The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has awarded Duke Energy another $68.5 million in damages over the Department of Energy’s failure to remove spent nuclear fuel from four nuclear power plants.
The Nov. 17 court ruling cites the Energy Department’s actions as a partial breach of contract with Duke subsidiaries Duke Energy Progress and Duke Energy Florida. Judge Thomas Wheeler awarded more than 95 percent of the $71 million Duke claimed in the case; DOE had contested only $3.4 million of that amount.
Duke’s claims for damages came from costs the company incurred for spent fuel management from 2011 to 2013 at its Harris and Brunswick nuclear plants in North Carolina, its Robinson facility in South Carolina, and the shuttered Crystal River site in Florida. This was the third round of claims against DOE for the four nuclear plants.
The Energy Department has faced a host of lawsuits from nuclear utilities for its failure to meet the mandate in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to begin moving spent fuel away from U.S. commercial reactors by 1998. The department’s mandatory “Standard Contract for Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and/or High Level Radioactive Waste” with nuclear power providers set a Jan. 31, 2018, for DOE to begin accepting spent fuel.
As of December 2013, Duke’s fees for disposal of spent fuel under its Standard Contracts with DOE for the Harris, Brunswick, Robinson, and Crystal River plants totaled $904 million. “To date, DOE has not provided the transportation of SNF from Duke’s sites to a DOE facility,” Wheeler wrote. “Duke intends to hold DOE to its obligation to perform, thus making DOE’s delay a partial breach of the contract.”
The federal government has paid out over $5 billion over the last 10 years, and still does not have permanent or interim repositories for the waste. Total DOE liability to nuclear utilities has been estimated at north of $20 billion.
Duke Energy since 1998 has received roughly $492 in damages for continued fuel storage in its nuclear power plants in the Carolinas and Florida, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.
