After three years of wrestling with Congress, the Department of Energy has finally convinced at least one chamber that it is time to move on fully from the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
In a bullet point so brief as to belie the drama that has beset the failed plutonium disposal plant, the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee last month announced it would provide the $79 million that DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks in fiscal 2020 for the facility’s planned replacement: dilute-and-dispose.
The full Appropriations Committee subsequently approved the funding, turning the MFFF’s funeral procession toward the House floor for a vote that had not been scheduled at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Whether there is anyone left in Congress who will play spoiler during these final few verses of the dirge remains to be seen, but Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the MFFF’s loudest ally, is as good a fit as any for the part.
Graham’s office did not reply to a request for comment about an April hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, during which the lawmaker dropped in to rail against dilute-and-dispose. That program, known officially in budget documents as Surplus Plutonium Disposition, “has not been well thought through,” the senator said.
“I have no confidence you’ve got a plan,” Graham told Energy Secretary Rick Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty at the April hearing. “You’re making this up as you go.”
The unscripted tirade stunned one of Graham’s colleagues, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).After all, as the subcommittee’s ranking member reminded Graham, the NNSA plans to turn the partially finished MFFF into a plutonium-pit production plant — proposing, in an ironic reversal, to fashion fresh nuclear-warhead cores on the bones of a building designed to beat 34 metric tons of plutonium into ploughshares.
“Are you saying you don’t want the pit plant?” Feinstein asked.
“No ma’am,” Graham told her. “I just am very skeptical of what’s going on. And I’m more skeptical today than I was before I came here that there’s a pathway out. [The MFFF] was the pathway out.”
After spending $5 billion on the project, DOE in October 2018 formally terminated construction of the MFFF. It said dilute-and-dispose would be both cheaper and faster.
Some in Washington view the South Carolina pit plant, one of two such facilities the NNSA now plans, as a pound of flesh for the Palmetto State delegation: something to get Graham on board with killing the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The NNSA denies any political motivation and says its two-state pit strategy — one plant at the MFFF site and one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — is a response to the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review’s direction to create a “resilient” production complex for the cores.
Graham, for his part, told Feinstein he is a “pretty hawkish guy” who has no problem with the pit mission, per se. Rather, Graham said, he is daunted by the idea that with MFFF absorbed into the weapons mission, dilute-and-dispose will mean plutonium disposal in South Carolina.
The NNSA’s chosen alternative to the MFFF involves chemically weakening surplus plutonium once slated to become mixed-oxide fuel, immobilizing it in concrete-like grout called stardust, and burying the mixture deep underground. The first two steps would happen at planned Savannah River facilities and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The third step, disposal, would happen at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. — and New Mexico’s congressional delegation is not yet signing on to that part of the plan.
“The state of New Mexico and our new governor … will have to review DOE’s permit to operate WIPP, which is up in 2020,” the retiring Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said during the same April hearing in which Graham slammed the MFFF cancellation. “If DOE expects New Mexico to cooperate about WIPP … then DOE must treat New Mexico fairly.”
Fair treatment, Udall said, includes reliable funding for nuclear weapons cleanup at Los Alamos, along with “improved support” from DOE in commercializing technology developed in New Mexico.
Finally, Udall said, the agency should commit to keeping the Los Alamos National Lab’s mission “stable and strong, and not subject to political moves.” A bit of shade, intentional or not, thrown at the NNSA’s decision to split its pit complex between two states.
Eventually, subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who like Udall is not seeking re-election in 2020, politely asked those of his colleagues affected in some way by the MFFF to take their concerns offline.
At deadline Friday, the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee had not scheduled a date to mark up its 2020 DOE spending bill. Last year, Alexander was perfectly happy to let the MFFF die. Graham, however, saw to it that the NNSA received none of the money it sought for fiscal 2019 to start work on three Savannah River glove boxes needed for dilute-and-dispose.
The NNSA says dilute-and-dispose would start up in 2028, if Congress provides the funding the agency seeks for the program.
How much plutonium is left to remove is a matter of some secrecy. The agency recently told media that there are 12 metric tons of defense plutonium at Savannah River, about half of which was never intended for the MFFF. Asked whether the other 6 tons of plutonium was surplus weapon-grade material designated specifically for disposal at the now-dead mixed-oxide facility, an NNSA spokesperson declined to comment.
Whatever the amount, and whatever its path out of South Carolina, the state and its senior senator are counting the days. The NNSA is under a court order to truck out 1 metric ton by Jan. 1, 2020 — it moved half of that to Nevada in 2018 — but that is no better than an opening act, as far as Graham is concerned.
At the April 9 appropriations hearing, Graham made that clear, telling his colleagues: “The one thing I’m focused on is to make sure, now that the [MFFF] program’s been cancelled, this stuff leaves my state.”
