Todd Jacobson and Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
5/16/2014
With the House Armed Services Committee rebuffing an attempt to boost authorized funding for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility in the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) hasn’t offered any hints yet as to whether he’ll fight to reinstate the funding when the full House takes up the bill next week. But Congressional aides say Wilson is likely to face an uphill battle if he hopes to restore the $120 million that the committee voted to shift toward Air Force drones instead of the MOX facility. “MOX was an easy target,” one aide said, “and he’s going to have a tough time finding something similar to go after to get that funding back. The big question is where do you find an offset that big?”
An amendment by Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) shifted the $120 million in MOX funding to pay for eight more MQ-9 Reapers for the Air Force. The MOX increase represented a boost above the $196 million the Obama Administration requested for the program, which it plans to put in “cold standby” starting in Fiscal Year 2015. Debate on the amendment was heated at times, with Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) calling the MOX funding boost a “zombie earmark” before the amendment passed by a vote of 32-29. Six Republicans voted for the amendment: Rep. Mike Conaway (Texas), Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), Jeff Miller (Fla.), Duncan Hunter (Calif.), Joe Heck (Nev.), and Kristi Noem (S.D.). Wilson could have a “really tough time,” the aide said. “You’re talking about funding on the order of $100 million. There’s not that amount of money to move around in the bill without upsetting a lot of people.” Wilson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Another aide said an additional concern could be reputational. Wilson leads the House Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee and is one of the more senior members of the panel, but while lawmakers showed deference to him during debate on the MOX amendment, they ultimately voted it down. “Do you try something and lose? He already looks pretty bad with the way the vote went last week,” an aide said. One alternative would be for Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) to lead the charge to restore the funding. Clyburn is the Assistant Democratic Leader of the House and his district includes many Savannah River Site employees. He is not on the House Armed Services Committee, but has joined with other members of the South Carolina delegation in support of the MOX project.
Sen. Scott Questions WIPP Alternative
Meanwhile, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) this week questioned the potential disposal of surplus plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico given the shutdown of the facility. While a recently released Department of Energy assessment of plutonium disposition alternatives found that downblending the material and disposing of it at a repository like WIPP would be less expensive option by billions of dollars, WIPP has been closed for more than three months due to a radiation release, and officials have said it could remain closed for up to three years. “Obviously you’ve seen the four alternatives or five alternatives to the MOX facility, one being the WIPP facility in New Mexico, which is currently recovering from a radiation leak. It is going to be closed for some period of time,” Scott said at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing to consider the nomination of Monica Regalbuto to serve as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management.
Regalbuto stressed that the report was a “preliminary study” and no decisions have been made. “I recognize that one of the options they looked at was disposal at a WIPP-like facility. So WIPP was used as a baseline because that’s the information that was known,” she said. “I do not believe that the intention was to make that decision at this point. If anything, there will be further studies done before they address this going forward because the true cost has not been determined in the options studies.”
When Scott asked how long WIPP is likely to be closed, Regalbuto replied: “I don’t think we can specifically say how long it is going to take because we really don’t know exactly what happened.” Investigations into the cause of the release are still ongoing, but a WIPP contractor official said last week that it would be a shutdown of at least 18 months and could last 24 to 36 months. Some surplus plutonium not suitable for MOX has already been disposed of at WIPP after being processed at Savannah River’s H-Canyon facilities, but disposition on a large scale will require changes by Congress to WIPP’s Land Withdrawal Act as well as talks with the state. However, in the light of recent events and discovery of shortcomings in safety culture and maintenance at the repository, the appetite for new missions at WIPP is uncertain.
Union Frustrated Over Removal of MOX Funding Bump
North America’s Building Trades Unions were “dismayed and frustrated” by the removal of the MOX funding from the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, the group’s president said May 12 in a letter to HASC Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.). “Once again, representatives of the party that is supposed to be looking out for the interest of workers votes to take food off their tables. It is incomprehensible to me that the jobs of 1,200 men and women on the MOX facility aren’t as important as the U.S. Air Force receiving eight MQ-9 Reapers. I’m sure that it is also no coincidence that the manfacturer of those reapers, General Atomics, has facilities in San Diego, California, the Congressional District of Congressman Scott Peters, who offered the amendment to shift the $120 million from the MOX facility to the Reapers,” Building Trades Unions President Sean McGarvey said in the letter.
