South Carolina may once again sue the Department of Energy, this time for terminating the Savannah River Site’s MOX project, state Attorney General Alan Wilson hinted in a statement on Monday.
This would be South Carolina’s fourth lawsuit since 2016 against the federal government over plutonium disposal at the DOE facility near the city of Aiken.
“We have been in communication with the Governor and members of the federal delegation. At this time, the Attorney General’s office is reviewing its next course of action. Right now, all options are on the table,” Wilson wrote in an email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The Energy Department announced on May 10 it would repurpose the unfinished SRS Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) for manufacturing plutonium pits, or cores for nuclear warheads. Energy Secretary Rick Perry last week formally waived the DOE requirement to build the MOX plant.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, in a May 2 letter to Perry, had already warned that the state “will use all legal recourse available to enjoin the DOE and continue the MOX program.” His office offered no further information on the matter Monday.
The Energy Department to date has spent about $5 billion on the facility, which is intended to convert 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The facility is behind schedule and over budget, and DOE has for several years unsuccessfully sought congressional approval to cancel the project in favor of processing the plutonium and burying it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
South Carolina agreed to house the MOX project under a 2003 agreement with DOE that includes a high-priced stipulation: The federal agency was supposed to process, or remove, 1 ton of the plutonium from the state before 2016, or pay $1 million a day, capped at $100 million annually. When payments did not begin, the state in February 2016 sued in U.S. District Court for the plutonium removal and the money due in a single lawsuit. More than a year later, South Carolina shifted the financial demand to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in two separate lawsuits before combining them into one case that seeks $200 million the state says it is owed from 2016 and 2017.
