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 roughly another 400 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 were hit by 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.
After the April round cuts, there will be just over 400 workers at the MFFF who have not been laid off. 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.
The NNSA estimates that MOX Services, owned by its primary subcontractors McDermott International and Orano, will completely wind down MFFF construction and turn the plant over to site landlord Savannah River Nuclear Solutions by October. The NNSA wants to convert the plant into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. There is no public schedule for layoffs past April 1.
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 reporters in South Carolina this week that he doubts South Carolina will ever get a plutonium pit mission.
