The Department of Energy says it should get to keep around $20 million in fees it clawed back from a contractor that failed to build a major nuclear-nonproliferation project in South Carolina on time.
The federal agency’s filing in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims last week was the latest turn in one of the two slow-simmering lawsuits over plutonium in the Palmetto State that has dogged DOE since 2016.
That year, CB&I AREVA MOX Services sued its DOE customer, alleging the agency had mismanaged a multibillion-dollar contract that called for the company to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The facility is intended to convert 34 metric tons of plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel under a pact with Russia.
The contractor is seeking roughly $200 million in damages, and it wants about $20 million of the total — incentive fees DOE reclaimed in 2016 — awarded to it immediately. MOX Services says its contract did not specifically allow the agency to void an incentive fee before the MFFF is built.
In a cross-motion on March 28, DOE said that idea was an “absurdity,” and that the agency was allowed to make decisions about this particular fee, and whether MOX Services had earned it, in 2016, when the first option on the company’s contract expired.
The department awarded the MFFF contract to a MOX Services predecessor in 1999. The company was supposed to finish construction by 2016: the end of the option period DOE cited in its argument for keeping the $20 million in fees.
When DOE cut the MFFF contract with MOX Services’ predecessor, the agency thought the facility would be built by 2016 and cost around $4 billion. The company now says it will cost $10 billion to finish MFFF by 2029. That includes $5 billion already spent by DOE, which says it will take $17 billion through 2048 to complete the facility.
Meanwhile, DOE is preparing congressionally mandated paperwork to cancel MFFF and proceed with an alternative plutonium disposal plan: diluting the material at proposed Savannah River Site facilities, then burying it deep underground in New Mexico.
