The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the prime contractor for a canceled plutonium disposal plant in South Carolina have reached an agreement in principle to settle a $200 million lawsuit the company filed nearly three years ago after the agency moved to shutter the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
MOX Services and the agency disclosed the possible settlement — but not its terms — in a Friday filing with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The parties asked Judge Thomas Wheeler to stay the case, which had not happened at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The parties plan to file a status report about their settlement within 30 days from whenever Wheeler does stay the case, attorneys for MOX Services and the NNSA wrote Friday. In the suit, the company seeks $200 million in damages and withheld fees from the federal government.
The NNSA terminated the Mixed Oxide Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in October after protracted legal and political battles with Congress and the state of South Carolina. The facility, at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., was to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under the terms of a reciprocal agreement with Russia.
The parts MOX Services built before the NNSA handed down the final stop work order would be repurposed into a factory capable of annually producing 50 plutonium nuclear-weapon cores by 2030.
In the lawsuit filed in August 2016, MOX Services accused the NNSA of badly mismanaging the project. The company alleged the federal government accepted new risk after new risk, effectively causing the delays, cost overruns, and dysfunctional management the NNSA cited in canceling the program after spending $5 billion since 2000.
The agency now plans to get rid of the plutonium via the dilute-and-dispose approach, under which the material would be suspended in concrete-like grout and buried deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
