A federal judge on Monday stayed the almost 3-year old lawsuit filed by MOX Services against the National Nuclear Security Administration after the parties announced they were close to settling the $200-million-plus case.
“After mediation, the parties have come to an agreement in principle on proposed settlement terms which, if approved, would resolve this consolidated case in its entirety,” Judge Thomas Wheeler wrote in an order filed Monday in U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
MOX Services and its estranged customer, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), disclosed the possibly impending settlement on Friday. The parties reached their settlement-in-principle on June 18 after mediation on June 11 to 12.
The settlement, if finalized, would cover nine lawsuits rolled up into one master suite filed in 2016 against the NNSA and its parent agency, the Department of Energy. The suit seeks more than $200 million in damages and withheld fees stemming from the department’s decision to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF): a plutonium disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The agency terminated MOX Services’ MFFF prime contract in October after an appeals court undid a lower court’s decision, handed down in a separate lawsuit, that briefly barred cancellation of the project. By that time the NNSA had spent about $5 billion over a decade of construction.
The agency now wants to turn the partially built facility into a plant to annually produce 50 nuclear warhead cores, or plutonium pits, by 2030. The NNSA still has some legal hurdles to contend with before it can realize that vision, but is closer to clearing those in 2019 than at any point since it officially asked Congress to end the MFFF.
The NNSA and MOX Services must by July 24 file a status update about their settlement negotiations, Wheeler wrote in Monday’s order.
