8/8/2017

ENERGY/LEGAL: “South Carolina’s attorney general is suing the federal government for $100 million, saying it hasn’t removed plutonium from the state as promised, a new tack in a long-running battle over the fate of a Cold War-era nuclear-weapons site.
Attorney General Alan Wilson, a Republican, said in a complaint filed Monday [8-7-17] in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that the Energy Department shouldn’t be allowed to ‘leave South Carolina as the permanent dumping ground for weapons-grade plutonium.’
The state is seeking to collect a $1 million-a-day fine set by Congress more than a decade ago as a way to force the Energy Department to either start removing weapons-grade plutonium by 2016 from the Savannah River Site near Aiken or start using it to make mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX. Mixed-oxide fuel is a means to convert weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear energy.
The Savannah River Site covers 310 square miles and was built in the early 1950s to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons. It is now primarily a waste-management site.”

-Valerie Bauerlein, “South Carolina Files $100 Million Suit Against U.S. Over Plutonium,” The Wall Street Journal online, Aug. 8, 2017 02:49pm