The Department of Energy again moved to waive a requirement to continue building a planned plutonium disposal facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., papers filed with a federal appeals court this week show.
The waiver came in the form of a Sept. 18 letter from Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in which the agency’s top weapons official said Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s May decision to cancel construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) had not changed.
“[T]his letter reaffirms the certification submitted by the Secretary of Energy to Congress on May 10, 2018,” Gordon Hagerty, wrote in a message to Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The letter was appended to a filing with the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Thursday heard arguments for and against a lower court’s June decision to block the agency from canceling the project.
This is the second time this year the Department of Energy has said it will opt out of building the MFFF. In the National Defense Authorization Acts for 2018 and 2019, respectively signed in December and August, lawmakers allowed the secretary of energy to cancel the facility if the secretary certifies an alternative plutonium-disposal method is about half as expensive to complete. Perry delivered a written certification to Congress in May in response to the 2018 act. Gordon-Hagerty, who is not herself authorized to waive the requirement to build the plant, delivered a copy of Perry’s May certification last week in response to the 2019 act, court papers show.
The MFFF is being built to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The NNSA says it will be cheaper to dilute the plutonium at planned Savannah River Site facilities, mix it with concrete-like material called stardust, and bury the resulting mixture deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
South Carolina sued the agency in May to stop the plan. In June, a federal judge handed down a temporary injunction against shuttering the MFFF, saying DOE had not completed a required environmental review of the alternative plutonium-disposal method. South Carolina says the congressional opt-out authority Perry exercised in May does not allow the NNSA to move ahead with an alternative plutonium-disposal plan without further environmental review.
The MFFF was supposed to be completed by 2016 and cost about $5 billion. The contractor building the plant — previously called CB&I AREVA MOX Services, now just MOX Services LLC — now estimates it could be done by 2029 for about $10 billion. The Energy Department says MFFF will take until 2048 to build and cost around $17 billion.
