About 60 workers, over the past two months, have been laid off at the incomplete Savannah River Site Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in order to keep construction on track, a spokesperson for plant contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services said Thursday. The layoffs are a result of severe restrictions on MOX project dollars, mainly because the Energy Department is not signing off on overtime except in special situations, the spokesperson said.
The contractor had planned this year to ramp up construction around this time as added insurance for ensuring the facility kept the same completion rate of about 4 percent a year. “Because that was the plan, and there are now these limitations by DOE, there had to be a choice made,” the spokesperson said. That choice was to redirect some support staff dollars to the construction side to keep pace. “Unfortunately, the redirecting wasn’t exactly a one-for-one,” the spokesperson said, which is why layoffs of support staff began in February. The support staff includes any non-construction job, such as human resources positions, engineering, procurement, and other positions. Overall, the project employs more than 1,900 and is in the process of hiring more construction workers.
From here, the direction of employment could go either way. In August 2013, the contractor reported that it was laying off 500 workers. But many of the workers were eventually hired back when the budget outlook started to improve. That could happen this time around, the spokesperson said. Or, more layoffs could be on the horizon. “If the funding situation doesn’t improve and they continue to deny overtime, then you might see it again. But there are no plans for it,” the spokesperson said.
The MFFF is part of a U.S.-Russian agreement that requires each nation to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium. The U.S. chose the MOX disposal method, which is expected to use the SRS facility to convert the plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. But rising costs, including a 2015 estimate from DOE that the project will cost $51 billion over its lifetime instead of the original $17 billion estimate, have resulted in a fiscal 2017 DOE budget request to terminate the project.
The Obama administration wants to move forward with downblending, a method that would dilute the plutonium at SRS and send it to another troubled facility – the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The transuranic waste storage facility has been shut down since February 2014 due to two separate incidents — a salt haul truck fire on Feb. 5 and the release of a small amount of radiation on Feb. 14. The Department of Energy says it intends to reopen the facility in December.
