Roughly another 440 people were scheduled to be laid off today from the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., in the second wave of job cuts at the cancelled plutonium-disposal plant.
Combined with the first swing of the axe in January, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) was to shed more than 1,000 jobs by this evening. The plant, construction on which was authorized in 2007, employed some 1,500 people when work was in full swing.
The next wave of layoffs is slated for March 4, when more than 100 additional workers are scheduled leave the site for good. That will bring the MFFF workforce down to about a quarter of what it was during construction.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) cancelled MOX Services prime contract to build MFFF in October after protracted legal and political battles. The agency has spent some $5 billion on the plant since 2000 or so and claims the facility is too expensive to continue.
Meanwhile, MOX Services and the state of South Carolina are still fighting NNSA in court over MFFF, and the 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium that was supposed to be disposed of in the plant. NNSA now says it will get rid of the material by diluting it and burying it deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Meanwhile, NNSA plans to make MFFF into a nuclear weapons plant that will annually produce 50 fissile weapon cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The conversion is not yet authorized or funded by Congress, but NNSA could request money for it, and the agency’s alternative plutonium disposal method, in its 2020 budget request.
The White House is nominally required to release NNSA’s annual budget request in February, along with the annual funding request for the rest of the federal government.
