The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday it has reached a contract closeout settlement with the company that was hired to build and operate a now-terminated plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
The settlement covers all “contract closeout matters” with MOX Services, according to a press release from the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency. The release does not disclose cost and schedule details, but The Aiken Standard newspaper reported that it received information that the settlement is valued at $186 million.
The NNSA this week did not respond to questions regarding the settlement.
The deal addresses all legal issues between the NNSA and MOX Services, except “potential claims under the False Claims Act, the Anti-Kickback Act, or for any civil or criminal fraud,” the release says. It does not state which legal issues remain between the two parties.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was being built to convert 34 million tons of surplus nuclear-weapon plutonium into commercial reactor fuel for nuclear power plants. The NNSA had spent more than $5 billion on the project at the time of termination in October 2018, and estimated it would cost another $12 billion to finish building the facility. Construction was expected to take until 2048.
The settlement enables the NNSA to dispose of the weapons-usable plutonium at lower cost to taxpayers, the release says. The method, already being used at Savannah River for a different mission, dilutes the plutonium using inhibitor materials, taking away its ability to produce nuclear weapons. The processed material will be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal.
Downblending is expected to cost $17 billion. That’s the same amount MOX was initially expected to cost, before projections ballooned to upwards of $50 billion. The federal government for years had been trying to terminate MOX due to the extreme cost overruns, and finally did so last October.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said in a prepared statement the settlement also enables her agency to proceed with repurposing the MOX plant for production of plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons. By 2030, the NNSA wants to produce 50 pits a year at SRS and another 30 annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
As of Tuesday, a federal lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department filed against MOX Services on Feb. 14 was still open in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. The suit accuses the company of submitting $6.4 million in false invoices from 2008 to 2016.
Also still open in the PACER system is MOX Services’ May lawsuit against the federal government, which alleges the NNSA short-changed the company by $53 million in payments for its work.
The NNSA was asked several questions about ongoing efforts to shutter the MOX facility and converting it for pit production. Questions included schedules and costs for pit production, the number of MOX Services’ employees still working on-site and resolutions for other legal issues not covered in the agreement. The agency did not respond by press time.
MOX Services is a subsidiary of McDermott International following its 2018 acquisition of Chicago Bridge and Iron, or CB&I. That company had purchased MOX Services’ previous parent, Shaw AREVA, in 2013. Shaw AREVA had inked a $2.6 billion deal with DOE in 2008 to build the Savannah River Site facility and oversee its startup.
