The Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday approved the White House’s nominee to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s roughly $2-billion-a-year nuclear nonproliferation branch.
The Donald Trump administration nominated Brent Park, an associate director and physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, on Feb. 13. It took the committee 21 days and one relatively smooth confirmation hearing to unanimously send Park’s nomination on to the full Senate for final approval.
The Senate had not scheduled a confirmation vote for Park at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The main mission of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation is controlling the spread of weaponizable nuclear material globally while also enabling peaceful atomic programs. That includes a massive plutonium disposal program the NNSA has tried for years to cancel, over the loud objections of Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
During the confirmation hearing Thursday, Graham made Park promise — if confirmed — to visit the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF)under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
CB&I AREVA MOX Services is building the massive MFFF to convert 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia. The company says the facility is 70 percent complete and could be finished in 2029 at a total cost of about $10 billion.
The NNSA says that estimate is way off the mark, given current budgets, and that the plutonium should instead be diluted, mixed with a concrete-like grout, and interred at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Graham asked Park, after he visits MFFF, to report back to the committee about how close the facility is to completion. Meanwhile, MOX Services is suing the NNSA in federal court for mismanaging the MFFF contract.
