Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) sparred with Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz on Wednesday over the Obama administration’s decision to shutter the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Mirroring a heated exchange with National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Frank Klotz at a Senate hearing late last month, Graham challenged Moniz at a Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee hearing on the planned closure of the project. “It seems to me that we started a project that apparently nobody knows that it even works,” Graham said, commenting on the administration’s reversal of its decision to implement MOX. “Somebody should be fired for that.”
President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget request for the Department of Energy (DOE) called for an alternative plutonium dilution approach instead of the MOX project, which was initiated under a U.S.-Russian agreement for each nation to convert 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. The alternative approach would likely send the diluted material for storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
“The MOX approach has extreme uncertainties,” Moniz said. “The biggest one of all is finding a billion dollars a year for decades.” A congressionally mandated independent review last summer said the MOX project’s life-cycle cost would be $51 billion. According to Moniz, the new approach would feature “essentially no technology risk” and cost about $15 billion throughout its lifetime.
“If you ran a private business and somebody created a project and you’re $5 billion into it and you find out it actually costs three times more than everybody thought, would you fire somebody?” Graham asked. Moniz said the contractors carried out some “severe reassignments of people.”
