The U.S. Department of Energy will argue in September why a federal court in South Carolina should not have prevented the agency from shuttering the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
Designed to convert weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel, construction at the unfinished MFFF was expected to halt around June 11, per a May 10 directive from Energy Secretary Rick Perry. But in a May 25 lawsuit to protect the project, South Carolina asked U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a full work stoppage at the facility. Childs granted the request on June 7.
The Energy Department is appealing Childs’ decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court announced Friday that oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 27 in Richmond, Va. Each party will have a chance to provide testimony and to respond to the other party.
Last week, Childs froze the full case until the appeals court makes it decision. While the full lawsuit is seeking a permanent decision to continue building MOX, the injunction request asked for a speedy decision to prevent DOE from terminating the project while the case is open.
The MOX project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, carrying a DOE projected life-cycle cost of $51 billion. That figure, which includes the $5 billion already spent, is three times more than the original estimate when construction began in 2007.
The Energy Department wants to repurpose the facility to make nuclear warhead cores, or plutonium pits. The 34 metric tons of plutonium that would be converted at the MFFF would instead be diluted at Savannah River and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico for permanent disposal.
South Carolina argued in the motion for the injunction that DOE had not conducted the proper safety and environmental protocols before making that decision. Childs agreed in her June 7 ruling, stating DOE can’t shutter the MOX project until it produces an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the risks and impacts of terminating work at the facility near Aiken, S.C., as the National Environmental Policy Act requires.
