The Government Accountability Office took a victory lap for a series of investigations it made into the now-cancelled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., saying the move saved some $13 billion.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was initially forecast to cost $4.8 billion, but “[i]n response to [the Government Accountability Office’s] recommendation, DOE undertook more oversight reviews and found that the facility would cost billions more,” Congress’ investigative arm wrote in a press release. “The Department identified a less costly alternative and terminated the project in 2018, saving about $13 billion.”
The $13 billion that the congressional inspector quoted was the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) estimated cost to complete the MFFF as of 2018: the year the agency officially cancelled the project, which was supposed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel.
While the Government Accountability Office’s short press release on Tuesday made no mention of the NNSA’s related plans to expand production of nuclear warhead cores to the Savannah River Site by converting the partially constructed MFFF into a plutonium-pit foundry, a look at the publicly available data shows the move may well save the NNSA money not only on construction over the next few years, but all throughout the roughly 50-year lifetimes of both the pit- and the plutonium-disposal missions.
At the NNSA’s last tally in 2018, an estimate from the agency’s program-independent Office of Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation, the nuclear-weapons steward estimated that MFFF would have cost some $55.5 billion to build and operate over the course of its life. On the other hand, MFFF’s replacement, the surplus plutonium disposition program, would cost about $20 billion over roughly the same life cycle.
At the same time, expanding its plutonium pit production complex to include Savannah River as well as Los Alamos would cost about $30 billion, according to an engineering assessment produced in 2018 by Parsons. NNSA’s aim is to ramp up to 80 pits annually by 2030. The Parsons assessment also found it could cost $15 billion to $20 billion to make all 80 pits a year at Los Alamos.
So, over their lifetimes, surplus plutonium disposition and a two-state pit complex will ring in at a combined $50.5 million or so, according to those NNSA estimates from two years ago. That’s somewhere between $10 billion and $15 billion less than it would have cost to continue with MFFF and have Los Alamos shoulder the pit mission alone.
Assuming the NNSA’s math holds up as it attempts construction and training efforts unprecedented in its 20-year history, if not in the history of the weapons complex, the Government Accountability Office seems to have a point: canning MFFF opened the door for savings.
