Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
6/5/2015
Questioning recent studies finding that downblending and disposal of surplus plutonium would be significantly less expensive than completing the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said this week those analyses are “rather incomplete.” A 2014 Department of Energy analysis of plutonium disposition options and a recently released study by Aerospace Corporation both found that downblending and disposing of the material in a repository such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would be less expensive than turning it into MOX fuel for commercial reactors. “When I look at the analysis that they have done, I think it is rather incomplete, quite frankly,” Simpson said at a meeting the Energy Facility Contractors Group held in Washington. “As an example, the last contractor that they had hired to do an independent analysis of these different proposals found that the blend down was about half the cost of what they said the lifecycle cost would be at MOX. But they didn’t take into consideration when they looked at that what it would cost to operate WIPP for another 15 years, and if you could get the authority to operate WIPP for another 15 years to put this waste down there and expand WIPP.”
The MOX facility, under construction at the Savannah River Site, aims to convert 34 metric tons of surplus weapons plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors as part of an agreement with Russia reached in 2000. However, the Obama Administration moved to suspend construction of the facility in 2014 due to cost increases, which resulted in opposition from lawmakers. Recent studies have pointed to downblending, which would involve processing the plutonium at Savannah River or Los Alamos National Laboratory, mixing it with an inert material, and then disposing of it at an underground repository. WIPP has been cited as a likely disposal site, but that facility remains shut down following a radiological release last year.
Simpson listed numerous potential issues with the downblending option. “I don’t think it has been a true analysis yet of what the lifecycle costs are and I’m not sure that costs are the entire factor. We don’t have an agreement with the Russians that would allow us to blend this down and meet the treaty obligations. Whether they would go along with it or not, I don’t know. We need to look at all the options on the table, but it is going to be a challenge for the next two years,” he said. A closer study of the downblending option would be required by the version of the FY’16 Defense Authorization legislation currently being considered by the Senate, which requested a new National Nuclear Security Administration study by October 31 that would be reviewed by the Government Accountability Office. The bill recommends $5 million in funding for the analysis.
‘We Need to Have a Serious Discussion’
Meanwhile, construction on MOX is funded at a rate of about $345 million per year in both House and Senate versions of the Fiscal Year 2016 energy spending bills. That rate is not expected to sustain progress on the project, according to the analyses. “What I don’t like is spending $345 million per year on MOX to just kind of keep it where it is,” Simpson said. “We need to either make a decision that we are going to proceed with this and finish it, and spend the money that is necessary to do it, which is probably closer to $550 million to $600 million per year to advance it, or we need to decide on another path. So we need to have a serious discussion about that.”
