The first round of layoff notices at the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) will be issued at some point in November, with impacted employees expected to exit in early 2019, the contractor building the Department of Energy plant said in an Oct. 22 letter to employees.
The notice was first reported Tuesday by newspapers near the Aiken. S.C., facility. A reporter from the Aiken Standard also tweeted a picture of the letter.
In the letter, MOX Services President David Del Vecchio wrote that Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notices will be issued next month. “Employees impacted by the first wave of WARN will leave the project after the 1st of the New Year,” Del Vecchio stated, adding that the schedule for future notices has not yet been determined.
Del Vecchio did not specify how many of the roughly 2,000 MOX employees will be terminated, but said they will be required to work 60 days under WARN. MOX Services is working with its parent companies, Orano and McDermott International, and the Energy Department to provide job opportunities for workers.
The notice comes after DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) ordered MOX Services on Oct. 10 to terminate construction of the facility, which was intended to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium under a U.S.-Russian arms control agreement. It was another blow to supporters of the project, after the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 9 lifted a lower court’s injunction against terminating construction of the facility. Once the MOX project is completely shut down, the federal government plans to turn the unfinished building into a factory for nuclear-warhead cores, or plutonium pits.
The Department of Energy has spent years, in both the Obama and Trump administrations, seeking to shutter the MOX project. It says the life-cycle cost of the project — from construction to operations to closure — will cost three times the original $17 billion projection, including $5 billion already spent. The department’s preferred alternative would dilute the plutonium using Savannah River Site facilities and ship it for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. That should only cost $17 billion, according to the agency, though MOX Services believes the DOE alternative would cost $20 million — $1 billion more than proceeding with the current facility.
Last week, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.). met with President Donald Trump in a last-ditch effort to save the project. All were noncommittal on whether the meeting changed the administration’s plans for the MOX facility.
