The Department of Energy has shied away from discussions about settling a $200-million lawsuit filed by CB&I AREVA MOX Services, which is building a massive plutonium-disposal facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., the contractor alleged in a Friday court filing.
MOX Services sued the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for damages last year, claiming the agency improperly withheld payments under a 1999 contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The plant, long-delayed and over budget after what MOX Services says are the NNSA’s mistakes executing the project, would turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
In early February, MOX Services said the NNSA made overtures about settling the lawsuit, plus two other pending suits involving MFFF and the facility’s host state of South Carolina. Since then, however, the agency “has not committed to participating in the global settlement conference previously contemplated by the parties,” MOX Services said in Friday’s filing before U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler.
MOX Services on Friday requested Wheeler reconsider a decision earlier this month that delayed a ruling on the company’s request for a swift partial payment in the lawsuit. The judge on Friday ordered the NNSA to respond to MOX Services’ latest motion by March 2.
The NNSA proposed canceling MFFF in 2015, potentially costing MOX Services billions of dollars in revenue and stranding some plutonium at least temporarily in South Carolina. The DOE branch said it would be cheaper to instead dilute the plutonium at proposed Savannah River Site facilities, mix the resulting material with concrete, and bury the mixture at DOE’s deep-underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Calrsbad, N.M.
After the NNSA awarded the MFFF contract, MOX Services’ predecessor company thought the facility would cost around $4 billion and be built by 2016. The contractor now thinks it will cost about $10 billion and take until 2029. The federal government thinks it will cost even more and take even longer. The NNSA has already spent some $5 billion on the facility.
