South Carolina has named its terms for settling a $200-million plutonium lawsuit against the Department of Energy, according to a late Tuesday court filing.
South Carolina on Jan. 30 gave attorneys at the Justice Department “a list of potential terms for negotiation” in the ongoing settlement talks that began in October, according to a status update the federal government filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
The terms remained undisclosed as of Wednesday morning. The federal status update did not disclose the terms, and South Carolina had not filed its own status update at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
“The parties intend to set up a meeting to discuss settlement within the next few weeks and agreed that the Court should continue the stay of this matter for another sixty days,” Department of Justice attorneys wrote for DOE in Tuesday’s status update.
In the suit filed in 2018 in the claims court, South Carolina seeks $200 million from DOE. The state says the agency violated a federal law that required it to either start processing weapon-usable plutonium at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., into commercial reactor fuel by Jan. 1, 2014, or remove the plutonium from the state beginning Jan. 1, 2016.
The Energy Department did neither of those things, triggering a provision of federal law that allows the state to fine the federal government $1 million a day for the first 100 days of every year beginning in 2016 that DOE does not move the plutonium.
In December 2017, a federal judge in a separate South Carolina lawsuit against DOE ordered the agency to move 1 metric ton of plutonium out of the Savannah River Site by Jan. 1, 2020. Some time in 2018, DOE moved half of that to the Nevada National Security Site. Another half metric ton is slated to go to the Pantex weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, if it has not already; DOE will not discuss its timeline for moving weaponizable plutonium, citing security concerns.
There was roughly 10 metric tons of plutonium at the Savannah River Site before last year’s shipment to Nevada, South Carolina has said in court papers.
