The budget for the Department of Energy’s controversial Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction in South Carolina would be cut to the lowest level at least since the start of this decade, under the 2019 DOE budget Congress approved this week.
The plant, being built by CB&I AREVA MOX Services, would get a $220 million appropriation if President Donald Trump signs the so-called minibus spending bill.
The 2019 appropriation would be about a 30 percent cut from the 2018 budget of $325 million. House appropriators, friendlier to the project than their Senate counterparts, proposed $325 million again this year, but the Senate would not budge from its position that it is time to cancel the delayed, over-budget plutonium conversion plant.
The silver lining for MFFF backers, if there is one, is that the latest budget specifies that the $220 million available for 2019 is specifically to continue construction. In addition, the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that became law this summer ordered DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to fund MFFF construction not only with future appropriations, but with any funding “otherwise made available.”
That could include carry-over funding: unspent sums of appropriations for the project from prior years. How much carry-over funding remains is unclear. Neither the NNSA nor the office of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a usually influential MFFF defender, would quantify the total amount of funding available for MFFF construction in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
“The carry over and the FY 2019 budget submission is sufficient to cover outstanding project liabilities and execute the work expected to be approved in the final appropriations bill,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday.
South Carolina has sued the NNSA in federal court to block cancellation of the project. The state won a temporary injunction in U.S. District Court in June to prevent cancellation at least until the end of the 2018 fiscal year or so. On Sept. 27, a federal appeals judge is set to hear oral arguments for and against lifting the lower court’s injunction.
In the meantime, the NNSA’s official plan is still to cancel the plant’s plutonium disposal mission and turn the facility into a factory for fissile nuclear-weapon cores called plutonium pits. The MFFF was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, under an arms-control pact with Russia that was finalized in 2010 after a decade of negotiations.
The NNSA is on the hook, per the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, to supply the Department of Defense with at least 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030. The agency wants to make 30 of those annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which is scheduled to start producing pits in 2026 and ramp up to 30 annually by 2030. By the same year, according to the NNSA’s mostly unfunded strategy to convert the MFFF into a pit plant, the South Carolina facility would be producing the other 50 pits a year needed to meet the Pentagon’s requirements.
Meanwhile, the 2019 defense authorization act gives Secretary of Energy Rick Perry the ability to cancel MFFF construction, if he certifies the alternative plutonium disposal method, dilute and dispose, is cheaper.The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act contained the same authority, and Perry exercised it in May. Despite that, Congress again ordered the DOE branch to keep building the facility, but again kept the door open for Perry to cancel it.
The MFFF was supposed to be completed by 2016 and cost about $5 billion. MOX Services 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.
