South Carolina, DOE Trade Fresh Barbs in Plutonium Lawsuit

The Energy Department and South Carolina traded barbed court filings this week in the state’s $100-million lawsuit over plutonium disposal at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, S.C.

DOE still wants the suit, filed in February, thrown out of court. South Carolina still wants Judge J. Michelle Childs to forgo a trial and order DOE to remove about 1 metric ton of plutonium out of the state, and pay a $100 million fine for not doing so by Jan. 1, as required under a 2003 agreement whose terms DOE now disputes.

Childs has scheduled a hearing for June 30, after which she would rule on South Carolina’s motion to skip a trial and hand down a summary judgement, but DOE has insisted the court not consider the state’s motion until first determining whether the court even has jurisdiction to rule on the case.

Despite South Carolina’s position that the court should order DOE to remove plutonium from SRS before even more of it arrives at the site, the agency wrote in a Wednesday filing “there is no urgency here,” and “[a]ccordingly, Defendants respectfully request that the Court stay all proceedings on South Carolina’s Motion for Summary Judgment until after the Court has ruled on Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss.”

The state’s frustration with DOE’s approach had started to show in another filing a day before.

“The position of the Federal Defendants is obviously to deny everything, including the effectiveness of the plainest statutory directives, while avoiding resolution of the merits for as long as possible,” South Carolina wrote in a Wednesday filing.

South Carolina contends DOE, per a 2003 agreement, had to either remove plutonium from SRS by Jan. 1, or process it into commercial reactor fuel with the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which is still under construction and not processing anything. The White House wants to stop building the facility, which while years behind schedule and well over its original $1.5 billion budget, is 50 percent complete, even by the most conservative estimate publicly available.

DOE contends the 2003 agreement only requires the agency to set goals for removing the plutonium, not to actually remove the plutonium.