The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in April will ask a federal judge in South Carolina to dismiss one of the two pending lawsuits the state brought against the agency for the government’s move to close the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, according to a court filing.
The agency will ask District Judge J. Michelle Childs to toss the nearly year-old suit by April 3 for lack of standing by South Carolina, a Friday notice reads.
After a protracted legal and political battle, the NNSA in October canceled the prime contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., after the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., found the state had no grounds to sue the agency in District Court.
The suit for South Carolina proved to be an ill-fated attempt to keep the plutonium disposal plant alive after both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump NNSA moved to kill it following $5 billion worth of development and construction.
The state won an initial victory in the District Court in June, when Childs temporarily blocked the NNSA from shutting down MFFF, or working on a planned replacement known as dilute and dispose. The Circuit Court threw out that injunction, ruling that South Carolina’s complaint — that the NNSA was illegally stranding plutonium in the state forever — was based on a series of assumptions that could not come to pass for years, and which did not entitle the state to sue in the first place.
The MFFF was designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. Dilute and dispose, for which the NNSA seeks $79 million from Congress for fiscal 2020, would prepare the surplus plutonium for deep-underground burial at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
