Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a vocal advocate for the Energy Department’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and a sometimes-vocal critic of President Donald Trump, spent the U.S. Columbus Day holiday golfing with the commander in chief, multiple news outlets reported.
CNN captured video of the senator on the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.
A spokesperson for Graham did not reply to a query about whether Trump and Graham discussed the beleaguered Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility on the links. The trip to the links happened the same week the facility’s prime contractor, CB&I AREVA MOX Services, confirmed it had laid of 200 employees at the site. That brought the total headcount there to 2,000 or so, a company spokesperson said.
The Trump administration has continued with its predecessor’s plan to cancel MOX. The White House says the facility, which is being built to turn surplus nuclear weapons plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel under an arms-reduction pact finalized with Russia in 2010, is too expensive. A government-chartered cost estimate put the facility’s lifecycle cost at more than $50 billion.
CB&I AREVA MOX Services maintains the facility is cost-competitive with the administration’s proposed alternative: diluting the plutonium, mixing it up with concrete-like grout, and burying the resulting cylinders deep underground in New Mexico at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The contractor last year ordered up its own independent life-cycle cost estimate for MOX, which came in at just under $20 billion.
Graham golfed with Trump fewer than two weeks after the strongly pro-Trump South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) visited DOE headquarters in Washington for a meeting with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette.
Spokespersons for the Energy Department and McMaster did not reply to queries Monday about whether the DOE bosses and the governor discussed MOX.
However, the week before he called on DOE headquarters, McMaster registered his support for MOX in a letter to Perry.
House appropriators strongly support MOX and have approved a 2018 DOE budget that includes $340 million to continue building the plant. Senate appropriators, however, decided to go along with the plan to kill MOX and provided around $270 million to shut the plant down in a a 2018 budget bill that cleared committee in July.
DOE, like the rest of the government, had its budget frozen at 2017 levels by the stopgap spending bill that was passed in September and funds federal agencies through Dec. 8. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
If MOX is terminated, the surplus plutonium it was supposed to process would still be treated at Savannah River Site. The Aiken, S.C., campus would use its chemical separations facilities to dilute the material, then use other facilities to mix the down-blended material with grout similar to that used to seal up the site’s Cold War-era waste tanks.
