Tuesday was the 10th anniversary of the start of construction of the Energy Department’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina — an occasion unheralded by either the agency or its contractor while lawmakers again debate whether to cancel the facility.
As part of an arms-control agreement with Russia, initiated in 2000 and finalized in 2010, the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility is designed to turn some 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors.
Russia and the U.S. have since gravitated toward other methods of plutonium disposal, with the Department of Energy saying last year it preferred to dilute the material, mix it with concrete-like grout, and bury the resulting mixture deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Congress has been split about MOX’s fate. Most recently, the House advanced a fiscal 2018 DOE spending bill that would provide DOE’s semiautnomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with $340 million to continue building the facility, while Senate appropriators approved a budget that would terminate the project.
The Trump administration, like the Barack Obama administration before it, has called for canceling MOX.
The Department of Energy says MOX will cost $51 billion over its lifetime, or three times more than originally estimated when construction began in 2007. The agency has already spent $5 billion on the project and estimates the dilute-and-dispose approach would cost $17 billion over its lifetime. On the other hand, a 2016 report commissioned by MOX prime contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services claims MOX would cost about $20 billion while dilute-and-dispose would cost $40 billion.
“The project is a monument to DOE waste, poor planning and inept project management and if anything is noted on the 10th anniversary of the MOX boondoggle it’s how not to carry out such a large construction project,” Tom Clements, director of the anti-nuclear Savannah River Site Watch, wrote in a press release Tuesday.
An NNSA spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday.
