As the calendar flipped to August, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility delivered nearly 30 more layoff notices that will reduce the facility to a skeleton crew of around 350 employees, according to a recent post on a South Carolina government-affiliated website.
CB&I Project Services delivered 29 more pink slips on Aug. 2, according to the SCWorks website. The McDermott-owned company is the majority owner of Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) prime MOX Services. Those given notice in the latest round of layoffs will leave the job at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., on Aug. 23, according to SCWorks.
The MFFF has now shed more than 1,000 employees since last October, when the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially canceled MOX Services’ contract to build the plutonium-disposal plant.
The NNSA wanted its contractor to finish putting the plant into standby mode before the end of the 2019 calendar year. After that, Savannah River management contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions will manage the construction site and help the NNSA with early plans to convert the facility into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile nuclear weapon cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
The MFFF was designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Barack Obama administration decided the plan was too expensive and asked Congress for permission to kill the project, which lawmakers finally allowed in 2018 as the Donald Trump administration continued to press for the facility’s wind-down.
