In an expected move, CB&I AREVA MOX Services argued Thursday a federal judge should not dismiss a $200 million lawsuit that claims the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration mismanaged the company’s contract to build a massive plutonium-disposal facility in South Carolina.
Hitting back against claims in the agency’s motion to dismiss the suit, MOX Services said its pre-litigation appeals to the government for restoration of clawed back fees were filed on time, and that the Court of Federal Claims is the correct venue for the lawsuit the company filed subsequently.
Thursday’s filing is part of a thawing in the lawsuit that began last week. After a month of relative quiet, MOX Services resumed a litigious posture with a Feb. 23 filing that alleged the NNSA stalled the lawsuit in early February by making overtures about settlement talks that never materialized.
In the suit filed in 2016 and amended in November, MOX Services claims the NNSA improperly reclaimed fees between 2008 and 2010 that the company is owed under its 1999 contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The plant, long-delayed and over budget after what MOX Services says are NNSA errors in executing the project, would turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
In last week’s filing, MOX Services said the NNSA discussed 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,” the contractor said in the Feb. 23 filing before Judge Thomas Wheeler.
In last week’s motion, MOX Services requested that Wheeler reconsider his early February decision that delayed a ruling on the company’s request for a swift partial payment in the suit. Wheeler ordered the NNSA to respond to MOX Services’ latest motion by Friday, which the agency had not done at press time for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
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 believes 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. MOX Services says the plant is 70 percent complete, but the NNSA disputes that figure.
Editor’s note, March 06, 2018, 4:16 p.m. Eastern: the story was corrected to say that MOX Services sued NNSA in 2016.
