As roughly 600 people walked off the job for good Monday at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., one of the parent companies of the canceled plant’s prime contractor announced another 100-plus will depart in early March.
CB&I Project Services Group, now owned by McDermott International, on Thursday told the SC Works nonprofit it will lay off 105 people MFFF on March 4.
That notice raises the number of layoffs planned through March to almost 1,150. The MFFF employed some 1,500 people before the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Oct. 10 terminated MOX Services’ prime contract to build the facility. Closeout work is set to continue through September.
The next wave of layoffs is scheduled for Feb. 4, when nearly 440 people are set to lose their jobs. The Savannah River Site’s management contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, has said it has about 900 job openings suitable for soon-to-be-unemployed MFFF employees.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico might also hire MFFF refugees, according to a notice posted on the LinkedIn social networking job site. The lab collected resumes last week and will conduct interviews between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday at the Fairfield Inn and Suites in Aiken.
The MFFF was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, under a 2000 bilateral arms-control pact with Russia.
The NNSA now wants to convert the facility to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The agency plans to eliminate the 34 metric tons of plutonium with a mostly unfunded approach called dilute-and-dispose: chemically weakening the material at proposed Savannah River facilities, mixing it with concrete-like grout, then burying the resulting mixture deep underground in New Mexico at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
