A leaked report from a nominally independent office within the National Nuclear Security Administration offers a trove of new details about the plan the agency must sell to Congress in order to start producing nuclear-warhead cores in South Carolina.
On May 10, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said he would officially cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) — intended to deweaponize 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium — and convert the unfinished building into a factory capable of making 50 plutonium pits a year by 2030.
Perry cited authority given to him by Congress to cancel the facility if he could prove an alternative, called dilute-and-dispose, could deweaponize the plutonium for half the cost of finishing the MFFF. Perry said dilute-and-dispose would cost about $20 billion while MFFF would cost about $50 billion.
Now, a 37-page report from the NNSA’s Cost Estimation and Program Evaluation (CEPE) office, obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists and posted online this week, fills in some of the details.
In inflation-adjusted terms, dilute-and-dispose would cost about $20 billion from 2019 through 2050, the CEPE office estimated in the study. That averages out to about $645 million per year.
Of the dilute-and-dispose total, nearly $8 billion would be spent at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would process surplus plutonium pits into plutonium oxide ahead of further downblending at the Savannah River Site’s K-Area.
Savannah River would take the next biggest share of dilute and dispose costs at around $6 billion, according to the internal NNSA report. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), which would receive the processed plutonium, bears the third-largest share of the costs at about $1.2 billion inflation-adjusted dollars, the report says.
Transportation costs to WIPP from the Savannah River Site — an expense Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has demanded the NNSA tally before it even thought of canceling the MFFF — would ring in at about $650 million over the life of the project. That includes both transportation and the criticality control overpack containers “and other containers” that would hold the material during the ride, according to the report.
Congress must still fund dilute-and-dispose, which so far it has not. An NNSA budget approved by the House Appropriations Committee this week would zero out DOE’s request for dilute-and-dispose and provide $335 million to keep building MFFF.
The Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee is set to unveil the text of its NNSA appropriations bill Tuesday. That measure could provide the funding the agency seeks for dilute-and-dispose, and fund the long-expected wind down of construction at MFFF. Federal law prohibits NNSA from halting construction at the facility until 30 days after Perry’s waives the requirement to build it, but the local Aiken Standard newspaper reported this week that NNSA has already halted hiring and procurement at the project.
South Carolina to Sue Again?
South Carolina officials, from Gov. Henry McMaster (R) and the state’s U.S. Senate delegation down to county and city officials, are interested in the pit mission, but completely uninterested in giving up MFFF.
This week, state Attorney General Alan Wilson repeated that all options for keeping the facility’s nonproliferation mission at Savannah River are on the table, including suing DOE over the planned cancellation.
This would be South Carolina’s fourth lawsuit since 2016 against the federal government over plutonium disposal at the Aiken, S.C., site.
“We have been in communication with the Governor and members of the federal delegation. At this time, the Attorney General’s office is reviewing its next course of action. Right now, all options are on the table,” Wilson wrote in an email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, in a May 2 letter to Perry, had already warned that the state “will use all legal recourse available to enjoin the DOE and continue the MOX [MFFF] program.” His office offered no further information on the matter this week.
South Carolina agreed to house MFFF under a 2003 agreement with DOE that includes a high-priced stipulation: the federal agency was supposed to process, or remove, 1 ton of the plutonium from the state before Jan. 1, 2016, or pay South Carolina $1 million a day each day thereafter, to a maximum of $100 million a year.
When payments did not begin, the state in February 2016 sued DOE in federal court for the plutonium removal and the money. The state now seeks $200 million for DOE’s failure to process or remove plutonium from South Carolina in 2016 and 2017.
