March 17, 2014

GRAHAM PUTS HOLD ON MONIZ OVER CONCERNS ABOUT MOX PROJECT

By ExchangeMonitor

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) isn’t happy that the Obama Administration is pausing work on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility to examine the nation’s plutonium disposition options due to massive cost increases to the project, and he’s placed a hold on the nomination of Energy Secretary nominee Ernie Moniz in an attempt to get the Administration to back off its plans. After blasting the Administration’s MOX plans at a Senate Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee hearing yesterday, Graham confirmed to NW&M Monitor that he was putting a hold on Moniz, who was cleared by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources last week. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) cast the only vote against Moniz in the committee over his concerns about MOX. “He’s a fine fellow, he’s a good man, but this is the leverage I have to get a better answer than we’re getting,” Graham told NW&M Monitor. “The President’s budget proposal is completely unsatisfactory.”

Graham said he was willing to work with the Administration to lower costs on the facility, which according to the latest estimates could cost as much as $8 billion, but he emphasized that the MOX facility was the only solution to meeting the plutonium disposition agreement between the United States and Russia. “I will work with the Administration—I talked to [White House Chief of Staff] Denis McDonough about this last night—to get the cost down, but I will not entertain for one minute a disposition plan other than MOX,” Graham said. Graham said he felt deceived that he agreed to language in the Fiscal Year 2013 Defense Authorization Act that postponed for two years a $100 million a year fine for the Department of Energy if the MOX project does not stay on track. “I can assure you I would not have done that if I’d known this year in the President’s budget they would be suspending the MOX program for study,” he said. “We have studied this thing to death. It is now time to get on and getting it built.”

NNSA nonproliferation chief Anne Harrington emphasized that the MOX project would be examined among the options the Administration is planning to consider. “MOX remains clearly on the table. It is not that we are disregarding MOX as a viable option,” Harrington said. Graham was not satisfied. “We’re halfway through. There is no other way to do it,” he said. “We have an agreement with the Russians, and now is not the time to break that agreement given the world in which we live in. And it is surely not the time to break faith with the people of South Carolina and Georgia. So when it comes to lowering costs, count me in. When it comes to studying another way to do it, count me out.”

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