The United States says the contractor for a cancelled plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site still owes the feds millions of dollars because of allegedly fraudulent billing and called the company’s claim that it already paid back the sum smoke and mirrors, according to a new court filing.
“MOX Services did make a payment to the United States in 2018,” U.S. attorneys wrote in a Monday motion opposing “That payment temporarily reimbursed the United States for invoices generated in a single year—2010—and is almost entirely irrelevant to this case.”
In the lawsuit filed in 2019, the government claimed that CB&I AREVA MOX Services, the prime for the now-cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), submitted nearly $6.5 million in false invoices based on fraudulent claims from subcontractor Wise Services over eight years starting in 2008.
The fraudulent claims included labor, materials and other “unplanned construction activities” at the plant, according to the Justice Department’s complaint.
In September, MOX Services claimed the Department of Energy had already recovered the sum sought in the 2019 lawsuit as part of the $34-million in disallowed costs the contractor had to give back to the agency in 2018. For that reason, the company said, Senior Judge Terry Wooten of U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Aiken should nix the government’s 2019 claim before the case has a chance to go before a jury.
The federal government seeks about $19 million in damages and costs overall in the 2019 lawsuit. Wise has said a rogue employee was responsible for the fraud.
Wooten had not ruled on MOX Service’s motion for a preliminary injunction at deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor. The judge has said the case will go to trial in November 2021 or later if the parties cannot work out the claims in mediation by June.
The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration officially terminated the MFFF in 2018 after years of trying to get Congress to go along with the plan. The facility will now be converted into the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility: a factory to annually manufacture at least 50 plutonium pits — fissile nuclear weapon cores — by 2030.
The replacement for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, Surplus Plutonium Disposition, is supposed to start diluting weapon-usable plutonium once bound for MFFF and shipping the material out of South Carolina in 2022, Scott Cannon, NNSA’s director of project management at Savannah River Site, told the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council last month. Savannah River’s share of the infrastructure needed for the new program won’t completely built until 2028.
