Making good on a recent threat, South Carolina on Friday sued the Department of Energy over its plan to halt construction of a plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site.
In a 42-page lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said shuttering the MOX program will breach a deal between the state and federal governments and leave unwanted plutonium at the DOE facility near Aiken, S.C. The defendants are Energy Secretary Rick Perry, his department, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty.
Wilson is also seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the MOX project from being shuttered. A hearing on that request is scheduled for Friday, The Augusta Chronicle reported.
On May 10, Perry formally announced DOE would halt construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) and repurpose the facility for production of nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits. Conversion is expected to cost $4.6 billion, and the reconfigured facility would produce 50 pits each year by 2030.
South Carolina is demanding the federal government resume work on the MFFF. Wilson had already written to Perry threatening to sue if DOE did not reverse course on the facility.
In the lawsuit, Wilson said Perry’s decision violates the terms of a 2003 agreement under which DOE was supposed to process, or remove, 1 ton of plutonium from South Carolina before Jan. 31, 2016, or pay $1 million a day, capped at $100 million annually. The federal agency to date has not removed the plutonium or paid any of the money.
Per the 2003 agreement, if DOE did not meet MOX production deadlines, it was supposed to submit a report to Congress detailing costs, schedules, and timelines for MOX alternatives. “The Defendants have never prepared this report, although they have been obligated to do so since at least 2012,” Wilson wrote in the complaint.
