South Carolina’s senior senator exploded at Energy Department officials on Tuesday, demanding to know why nobody has been fired for the White House’s apparent flip-flop on turning 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear plants.
“This is what’s wrong with the government!” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) shouted at National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
Graham’s outburst centered on the White House’s controversial plan to close the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) being built by CB&I AREVA MOX Services at DOE’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The facility is being built to satisfy the U.S. obligation to dispose of excess weapons plutonium under an arms-reduction pact with Russia.
However, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2017 budget request proposes canceling MFFF — at a cost of about $600 million over “several years,” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz has said — and instead diluting the surplus plutonium into a form that could be safely stored somewhere. At the hearing, Klotz, administrator of DOE’s semiautonomous nuclear arms branch, said the diluted waste would be stored either at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., or at a “repository like WIPP.”
“We think it’s an excellent plan,” Klotz told Graham.
“I think it’s a lousy plan!” Graham shot back. “A plan I don’t have zero confidence in!”
Graham said there could be insurmountable legal and technical hurdles to opening WIPP — which is closed to waste shipments until at least Dec. 12 following two February 2014 accidents — to even diluted weapons-usable plutonium. Graham said he asked DOE about these obstacles in a recent letter to Moniz. A Graham spokesperson on Tuesday declined to provide that letter.
Also at the hearing, Graham took Klotz to task for failing to discuss the White House’s plan with Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “I’ve talked to both of them and they’re not OK” with sending more diluted plutonium to WIPP, Graham told Klotz.
A Graham spokesperson on Tuesday referred questions on the matter to the New Mexico senators. While Heinrich declined to comment on discussions with Graham, he said the White House’s budget does not provide a clear path for transitioning from MFFF to a dilute-and-dispose approach that might utilize WIPP.
“With respect to the MOX project in South Carolina, I believe the administration should not propose to terminate the project without first presenting a clear and practical alternative that meets international commitments and has the support of the public, state authorities, and Congress,” Heinrich said through a spokesperson in a Tuesday email. “This budget proposal does not meet that requirement.”
In a statement, Udall said sending more diluted plutonium to WIPP “is not a small issue to address,” and would “require an Environmental Impact Statement, public comment, and agreement from the state of New Mexico which has permitting authority over WIPP.”
“The burden of proof is on the Department of Energy,” said Udall.
