U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said Monday he expects Congress to restore funding for the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) when lawmakers return to Washington next week. Members of the House and Senate entered into conference committee in July to hash out details of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); Wilson, one of the conferees, said they may wrap up discussions as early as next week.
The MFFF would convert 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. The United States is bound to eliminate the material under a bilateral nonproliferation deal that requires Russia to get rid of an equal-sized stockpile.
But the Obama administration’s fiscal 2017 federal budget proposal looks to terminate the project and move forward with downblending, an option that would dilute the plutonium using SRS facilities and store the material at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The Energy Department says the MOX life-cycle cost is $51 billion, including nearly $5 billion already spent. The agency says downblending would only cost $17 billion.
Wilson and other members of the South Carolina congressional delegation have denounced those figures, as has MOX contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services, whose board of governors commissioned a study last year that priced the project at $19 billion and downblending at $20 billion.
Both the House and Senate were seeking authorization for $340 million in their respective NDAAs to continue construction of MFFF before entering conference committee. The House passed its version of the NDAA in May and the Senate did the same in June. “I feel good about getting that funding, and even if we get into a continuing resolution (CR), every effort will be made to keep that wording for construction,” Wilson said on Monday. “It’s in the interest of the American people to continue with MOX.”
The White House has threatened to veto both versions of the NDAA over the MOX language and other measures.
Senate Armed Services Committee spokesman Dustin Walker on Wednesday said he could not offer a timeline for completion of the NDAA conference: “As the saying goes, conference takes as long as conference takes.” While noting that MOX funding is one of the issues to be considered, Walker said he could not preview any outcomes of the conference.
The Senate energy appropriations bill would provide $270 million for MOX construction and give the secretary of energy reprogramming authority to allocate funds from one construction project to another, or to change the scope of an approved project. The House version of the spending bill would allocate $340 million for MOX and prohibit the use of the funding to place the plant in “cold standby,” or suspended with the option to resume activity. It remains unclear whether Congress will pass the spending legislation for fiscal 2017, which begins on Oct. 1, or whether it might fall back to a partial or full-year continuing resolution, which would freeze funding at current levels.
Wilson added that Russia is also against the termination of the U.S. MOX program. In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters that he disapproves of the attempt to terminate MOX because it would violate the agreement. “We signed this agreement and settled on the procedures for the material’s destruction, agreed that this would be done on an industrial basis, which required the construction of special facilities. Russia fulfilled its obligations in this regard and built these facilities, but our American partners did not,” he said.
