When lawmakers return to Capitol Hill next week, yet another report proclaiming the fundamental unsoundness of the Energy Department’s proposal to store surplus plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. will greet them.
Delivered to the Hill on Thursday, the latest report by Greensboro, Ga.-based High Bridge Associates — the consulting firm repeatedly hired by MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services to vet the Department of Energy’s plan to cancel that multibillion-dollar facility — is a 30-page exercise in accounting- and project-management-forensics that claims DOE vastly overstated the cost of finishing the MOX plant and vastly understated the cost of canceling the project, which is designed to turn surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel suitable for commercial nuclear reactors.
The report is the latest salvo in an ongoing political tug-of-war over 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium the U.S. is obliged to get rid of as part of a nuclear nonproliferation pact finalized with Russia in 2010. Both countries agreed on a MOX pathway, which is legally still the program of record in the U.S.
According to the High Bridge report, finishing the MOX plant and processing 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium would cost about $20 million and take fewer than 30 years, assuming an annual budget of $500 million — nearly $150 million more than Congress approved in 2016. On the other hand, High Bridge said, scrapping the MOX program and diluting the plutonium for storage at WIPP could cost more than $40 billion and take almost 50 years, according to the report.
The Energy Department, meanwhile, has said a $500 million annual budget would not get the plant finished for 30 years. At the same annual spend rate — which actual budget so far have not nearly matched — the plant’s life cycle cost would be more than $45 billion, DOE said. The agency got its figures from a 2015 report written by the government-funded Aerospace Corp., which concluded the MOX facility is only about 50 percent complete. High Bridge thinks the plant is closer to 70 percent done.
High Bridge said DOE’s assumptions about cost growth for MOX buck historic trends for big nuclear engineering projects, and are “exceptionally high and unreasonable.” The firm also estimates the MOX facility will cost $500 million a year to build, and about $450 million a year to operate, after construction is complete. DOE officials have pegged annual MOX construction and operations costs at close to $1 billion.
“The Department has not reviewed this report and cannot comment on it specifically,” a spokesperson for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration wrote in a Friday email. “However, we have considered previous similar assertions from High Bridge and found them not well founded. It is clear from several independent analyses that the already-proven dilution and disposal alternative would enable the plutonium to be disposed of sooner than the MOX approach, at less than half the cost, and with far lower risks.”
Although the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement between the U.S. and Russia leaves the door open to other disposal options than MOX, the White House’s proposal to substitute a dilute and disposal method has roiled not only those with a stake in the MOX plant itself — such as the prime contractor and outspoken Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — but also the Kremlin. In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a state news agency the White House’s proposal to abandon MOX was one of the reasons he skipped the final Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C.
Graham, meanwhile, has applauded the Senate Appropriations Committee’s decision to have the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold a hearing to help decide the MOX plant’s fate.
“If you’re looking for a good time, come listen to that hearing,” Graham said during an appropriations subcommittee markup in April. “I am going to weigh into these guys like Sherman going through Georgia.”
To date, the Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled no MOX hearing. The first opportunity for that panel to weigh in on the plant would be in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act it will begin marking up at the subcommittee level Monday.
The 2017 energy and water appropriations bill awaiting a vote on the House floor would provide $340 million for MOX: exactly what the plant got in 2016. The House’s bill explicitly says money appropriated for MOX starting next fall “may be made available only for construction and program support activities.”
The Senate’s bill provides $270 million for MOX in fiscal 2017 and contains no such legislative imperative. During the subcommittee markup in which Graham likened his defense of MOX to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s decimation of Georgia during the Civil War, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), DOE’s chief Senate appropriator, said he understood the agency’s concerns about MOX’s rising price tag, but that he would leave it to the Senate Armed Services Committee to decide whether the plant should be closed.
The New Mexico Senate delegation has publicly sought to stay above the fray. Senior Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) in February received DOE’s plan tepidly, saying plutonium storage in the state “is not a small issue to address,” and would “require an Environmental Impact Statement, public comment, and agreement from the state of New Mexico which has permitting authority over WIPP.”
Meanwhile, DOE in April finalized a decision to move some 6 tons of weapon-usable plutonium to WIPP. That material likely will not be interred at WIPP until early next decade, Moniz said in February.
