MOX Services, the prime contractor for the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will lay off another 369 people on April 1, according to South Carolina’s quasi-official unemployment services.
MOX Services announced the impending layoffs Monday, the same day almost 450 workers left the project for good in the plant’s second wave of layoffs.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) terminated the MFFF prime contract in October after drawn-out legal and political battles. Since January, MOX Services has laid off around 1,000 workers.
The April round of cuts will leave just over 400 workers at the MFFF. As recently as last year, before construction ended, MOX Services employed about 1,500 people.
The plant was to turn 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial power plants under a 2000 arms-control pact with Russia. The NNSA deemed that approach unaffordable after spending roughly $5 billion on MFFF since the turn of the millennium. Now, the agency wants to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium using a method dubbed dilute-and-dispose: chemically weakening the plutonium, blending it with concrete-like grout called stardust at Savannah River, and burying the material deep underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
MOX Services estimates it will take until October or so to completely wind down MFFF construction and turn the site over to Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the site’s management contractor. The NNSA wants to convert the plant into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who fought to keep the MFFF alive, has said dilute-and-dispose will not work. Graham told the local Aiken Standard newspaper Monday he doubts South Carolina will ever get a plutonium pit mission.
