The U.S. Department of Energy and South Carolina said Tuesday they probably will not settle their differences about whether the agency owes the state hundreds of millions of dollars for its failure to remove plutonium from the state by 2016.
That conclusion was all but foregone, as South Carolina has already submitted a motion for summary judgment asking U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Margaret Sweeney to award the state $200 million in penalties from the DOE for failing to either remove at least 1 ton of weapon-usable plutonium from the state by Jan. 1, 2016, or turn the material into commercial reactor fuel.
“At present, the parties do not anticipate that this dispute will be resolved through settlement,” DOE and South Carolina said in a status update filed with Sweeney.
Conversion to commercial reactor fuel is impossible at the moment, and might never happen at all.
In 1999, DOE began building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., to turn 34 metric tons of plutonium into reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia. The facility, which DOE thought would be online in 2016, is now more than 10 years behind schedule and $5 billion over budget, by the most optimistic cost estimates in the public sphere.
The Energy Department wants to cancel the project and instead use proposed, but unfunded, facilities at Savannah River to dilute the plutonium, mix it with grout, and send the resulting mixture to the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M,. for permanent burial deep underground.
DOE announced Thursday MFFF would be turned into a factory to produce fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
South Carolina says that is not the deal it bargained for in 2003, when it signed an agreement that allowed DOE to bring plutonium into the state for processing at the MFFF. The agreement stipulated the federal government would pay $1 million a day in fines for every day beyond Jan. 1, 2016, that it failed to process the plutonium, or remove it from South Carolina.
Under the 2003 agreement, annual fines are capped at $100 million. The bill, by South Carolina’s reckoning, has run up to about $300 million.
