A judge recently spiked the Department of Energy’s motion to dismiss a complaint lodged by CB&I AREVA MOX Services in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, potentially allowing the government contractor to collect what it alleges are almost $6.5 million in improperly denied fees.
The complaint is one of eight now consolidated under a $200-million-plus federal lawsuit MOX Services filed in 2016 over the agency’s decision to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) and turn the unfinished plutonium-disposal plant into a factory for nuclear-weapon cores. MOX Services is building the facility at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina under a contract awarded in 1999 to its predecessor company.
In a complaint filed April 9, MOX Services said DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) breached the contract by denying the company part of a fee increase the agency agreed to pay after adding work in 2008.
The NNSA denied it ever owed MOX Services the disputed portion of the fee increase, which the agency said was tied to a contract option the government did not pick up. For that reason, the NNSA asked Judge Thomas Wheeler to throw out the company’s complaint.
Wheeler declined. MOX Services “has articulated a plausible claim to relief based on the alleged actions taken against Plaintiff by the United States,” Wheeler wrote Friday after oral arguments on Sept. 11. “The case shall continue according to the current schedule.” The whole lawsuit is set to go to trial in April 2019.
The MFFF is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel to satisfy terms of a reciprocal plutonium-disposal agreement with Russia. The plant was supposed to open in 2016 and cost about $5 billion. MOX Services estimates the facility will not open at least until 2029, at a cost-to-complete of $10 billion or so. The NNSA thinks it will cost closer to $17 billion and take until 2048 to finish.
The state of South Carolina has sued the NNSA to stop the agency from canceling the project. An appeals judge is set to hear oral arguments Sept. 27 about whether to lift a temporary construction-stoppage ban the state secured in June from the South Carolina District Court.
