Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
2/6/2015
The Obama Administration’s decision this week to continue with construction on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Fiscal Year 2016 was met with praise from Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who was among the lawmakers that fought against the Administration’s decision to put the project into cold standby a year ago. “I am encouraged to see that the President’s budget reflects the will of Congress to move forward with construction of the MOX facility,” Wilson said in a Feb. 3 statement. “This facility is essential to our national security as it will allow the United States to honor its international nuclear nonproliferation obligations, while it also supports environmental cleanup within the Palmetto state.”
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz called the $345 million Fiscal Year 2016 MOX budget request a “continuation” budget that would allow construction to continue—albeit slower than project officials would like—while analyses of the nation’s plutonium disposition options are completed. Like Wilson, David Del Vecchio, the president of MOX contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services LLC, called the budget request “encouraging” in a message to employees Feb. 3. “Although the new budget request does provide us more confidence in moving forward without the threat of being placed into ‘cold standby,’ we still have a number of challenges ahead to finish the job,” Del Vecchio said.
The MOX facility is currently the designated pathway in an agreement with Russia for disposal of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium in each country. While the FY 2016 budget request will keep construction going for now, Moniz said when a deeper analysis of plutonium disposition alternatives is complete, DOE will work with Congress to finalize a FY 2016 budget for the program.
An NNSA study released last year revealed that estimated construction costs for the facility had risen to approximately $10 billion, up from a previous estimate of $7.7 billion and an earlier baseline of $4.86 billion. Budget documents indicated that the current estimate for building the facility is $9.1 billion, with an estimated total project cost of $12.7 billion (which includes D&D and other costs). A more detailed follow-on study is ongoing, as is a Congressionally directed independent lifecycle cost estimate on the price tag to complete and run the MOX facility and an option to downblend and dispose of the material in a repository.
Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson Makes Case for MOX
Before DOE’s FY 2016 budget request was released earlier this week, the MOX project received a vote of support from a former DOE official key in the project’s inception. Bill Richardson was the Secretary of Energy when the Department began heading down the path to building the MOX facility, and 15 years later, he’s still a supporter of the project. Writing in U.S. News and World Report Jan. 31, Richardson urged the Administration to move forward with the project despite rising costs. “MOX is nearly two-thirds done, and the roughly $4 billion spent already is sunk and gone,” Richardson wrote. “We should use our brief freedom from election year politics to think long term, and not waste the next two years trying to kill what will surely be a non-proliferation success story.”
Richardson defended the rising price tag of the facility, calling the ballooning costs an “urban myth.” He said the rise in costs “would be astounding, were it true, even for a complex first-of-a-kind nuclear facility. But, there was never any real engineering to support the low baseline number that makes the oft-repeated percentage increase so offensively large. Succeeding management teams at DOE just ran with somebody’s rough stab at finding a starting number. It stuck.”
He also said starting construction in 2007 without a complete design and stringent Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements has hurt progress on the facility, but added it was time to complete the project. “MOX has been on track for a long time, with its design and growing pains behind it,” Richardson wrote. “When ground was broken in 2007, there hadn’t been any new nuclear construction begun in the U.S. in 30 years. A sophisticated labor force and supply chain had to be built from scratch at great expense, and the president’s all-of-the-above energy policy will benefit for decades.”
