MOX Services, the contractor that was building the canceled plutonium facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, settled allegations of fraud with the government to the tune of $10 million, the Department of Justice announced Monday.
The contractor paid to end the nearly three year-old litigation over federal claims that it submitted “false and fraudulent invoices for non-existent materials and receiving improper kickbacks,” according to Justice’s press release.
“It is vital that contractors on federally funded projects provide sufficient oversight of the companies they hire to ensure that the government is billed only for legitimate goods and services,” Brian Boynton, the principal deputy assistant attorney gGeneral and head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in the release. “The department will pursue those who knowingly fail to prevent the submission of false claims.”
MOX Services settled for about half of what the government went after when it alleged in 2019, in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina, Aiken Division, that subcontractor Wise Services had been cranking out fraudulent invoices for work on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Wise blamed a “rogue employee,” Phillip Thompson, for the alleged fraud. Thompson went to prison after admitting in 2017 that he defrauded the government in a separate matter. MOX Services said in court filings that it did not know about Thompson’s behavior.
In 2018, after years of trying to convince Congress to go along with its plan, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Security Administration (NNSA) canceled the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) that MOX Services and its predecessor companies were building at Savannah River.
The facility was intended to convert surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. Utilities lost interest in the plan somewhat early in its lifetime and, in any case, never constructed any reactors that could burn the mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel the canceled Savannah River plant would have produced. The NNSA settled on another means of disposing of the plutonium — diluting it and mixing it with a concrete-like substance before burying it at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant — though it did reclaim some of the surplus to make new pits.
The NNSA also decided to turn the partially constructed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a factory to produce at least 50 plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon triggers — some time in the 2030s. The agency’s goal for pit startup around the time that it canned MFFF was 2030.
In 2021, after much public hedging about how it was “challenged” to meet that goal, the agency said the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility would probably not start casting pits until some time between 2032 or 2035.
