Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
6/6/2014
The Department of Energy would be required to continue construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility until it completes an assessment of alternatives under the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, details of which were released this week. DOE currently plans to put the plant into "cold standby" in FY’15 and complete its options study in 12-to-18 months. However, the report accompanying the Senate bill states, "Until such time as the committee receives and evaluates a final report listing alternatives to reducing the 34 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium to MOX, the NNSA is directed to continue construction of the facilities."
Citing ballooning costs, DOE’s FY’15 budget request aimed to immediately suspend construction of the MOX facility and cut the project’s proposed construction budget to about $196 million while it completes a 12-to-18 month study of alternatives. But MOX supporters have fought back: The Senate NDAA would also increase authorized construction funding for the plant to a total of $456.1 million. A lawsuit from South Carolina forced the Department to postpone project suspension until FY’15, unless it receives other direction from Congress. The House, meanwhile, did not include increased authorized funding for MOX in the version of the defense authorization bill it passed last month—an authorized increase of about $120 million was stripped during debate in the House Armed Services Committee.
A chief advocate for MOX in the Senate has been Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). After an initial markup of the legislation in late May, Graham said in a statement: "The Obama Administration’s decision to suspend construction on the MOX facility is both ill-conceived and dangerous. The Senate Armed Services Committee took the first step in rejecting the Obama Administration’s reckless efforts to put MOX in ‘cold standby.’"
Uncertainty at WIPP Impacts Alternatives
Meanwhile, uncertainty at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has made a leading alternative to MOX less attractive. DOE this spring released an initial assessment of alternatives to MOX’s mission of fulfilling an agreement with Russia to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium. That assessment found that disposal of the material in WIPP would cost only around $8 billion, far less than the $30 billion lifecycle cost attached to MOX. However, a radiation release at WIPP has shut down the plant indefinitely and diminished state and local interest in new missions for the facility. If a new repository would need to be located to dispose of the plutonium, the case for direct disposal of the material would not be very strong. "The cost and the early start were the biggest advantages of the downblending option," Miles Pomper of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies said this week at an event for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Pomper added that another option studied, vitrification of the material in high-level waste, has the advantage of having a radiation barrier as well. The vitrification option was found by the initial study to come in on par with MOX in cost and have a higher level of uncertainty and risk. But that was because it assumed that vitrification would need to take place at Hanford, because it found that Savannah River, where the plutonium is located, did not have a sufficient amount of high-level waste, according to Ed Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "You only need a fraction of the remaining cesium at the Savannah River Site to meet … the agreement specifics. So I’m not persuaded by the argument that there isn’t enough. It’s really just a timing issue," Lyman said.
Lyman said that Savannah River has an advantage over Hanford in that there is no need to construct a completely new plant. "At Savannah River Site they have the K Area where they could presumably have some sort of immobilization capacity by using existing infrastructure tgat might reduce cost. So if you’d have to go greenfield that automatically gives you a huge price tag. That is partly why the price tag for immobilization is so expensive," he said. "But also I don’t think they looked very carefully at how you could save or reduce costs through immobilization. There are many processes that you just don’t need with immobilization that you need with MOX. You don’t need chemical separation. You could just blend various materials together and get rid of impurities that way. You don’t need to grind any pellets like you do in a MOX plant because immobilization doesn’t have to go into a reactor. So just looking at the cost of the MOX plant is not necessarily indicative of how we could save money on immobilization."
