One of the parent companies of the prime contractor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility said Monday it will be acquired by Houston-based McDermott International in a $6-billion all-stock deal slated to close in the second quarter of 2018.
At the close of the transaction CB&I, the Woodlands, Texas, energy technology and infrastructure provider, will combine with the engineering and offshore-oil-infrastructure company and be led by David Dickson, currently president and chief executive officer of McDermott.
CB&I is one parent to CB&I AREVA MOX Services, which is building the NNSA’s MOX plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The joint venture broke ground on MOX in 2007, at which time NNSA thought the facility would be operational in 2016.
More than 10 years later, the facility is still under construction and the NNSA has proposed canceling the project. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have said it will be impossible to complete the facility under expected NNSA budgets.
The agency has so far spent about $5 billion on the MOX plant, which is designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms-control pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
However, the United States now proposes instead to dilute its surplus plutonium, mix the material with grout, and bury the resulting cylinders deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Elected officials from South Carolina, from local to federal, have fought all plans to mothball MOX. Congress has so far refused to cancel the program.
It was not clear at deadline Monday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing whether the proposed merger of CB&I and McDermott would affect MOX.
