Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
11/20/2015

Funding for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility is expected to be included in the final fiscal 2016 appropriations bill after President Barack Obama’s official funding request clattered its way through scrupulous Energy Department-commissioned reviews, contentious congressional negotiations, and reported private meetings between DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration brass and Senate appropriators, according to two sources close to ongoing conference appropriations discussions between Congress’ two chambers.

The sources said DOE and NNSA officials have recently communicated behind the scenes with lawmakers in apparent hopes of zeroing out funding for MOX for fiscal 2016. As of “a week or two ago,” according to one of the sources, “The talk in DOE was that [Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Committee Chairman Lamar] ‘Alexander (R-Tenn.) has not delivered yet.’”

DOE has conducted several studies, and officials have repeatedly indicated—most recently to Congress during a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing in October—that dilution and disposal has supplanted conversion into MOX fuel as their preferred pathway to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium in accordance with the 2000 U.S.-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA). This comes even though MOX contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services estimates it has already constructed about 70 percent of the facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The MOX hearing followed the conclusion of a Red Team review in August, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason, whose recommendations to DOE seemed to favor dilution and disposal for cost and security reasons, among others. Per the PMDA, the U.S. and Russia must each dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-ready plutonium through the MOX method. As WC Monitor previously reported, the Russian government has signaled it would be open to considering another U.S. disposal path. 

The Obama administration requested $345 million to fund MOX for fiscal 2016, but it is unclear how much of that is slated to be written into the E&W portion of appropriations legislation, which congressional staffers have said appropriators were expected to finish drafting sometime today.

The two sources both said that MOX supporters within Congress have made headway in trying to persuade Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that funding the project would likely translate to rescuing hundreds of union workers from potential unemployment.

An NNSA spokesperson said by email the agency does not comment on its conversations with Congress, and later said NNSA will comply with “applicable regulatory requirements” related to building MOX.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2016, which was still awaiting Obama’s signature late Friday morning, would require Moniz to re-baseline project construction and support activities for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility for fiscal 2017, and to carry out MOX construction in fiscal 2016 at the Obama administration’s requested funding level.

“Per the direction of Congress, the Department is continuing construction of the MOX facility, and Department will continue to follow direction from Congress for the Fiscal Year 2017,” an NNSA spokesperson said by email this week.

One of the sources, a MOX supporter, expressed concern that fiscal 2017 appropriations might drop the financial support for the program that the final fiscal 2016 spending bill is expected to uphold. “I really think, ultimately, we’ll be OK for ’16,” the source said this week. “My focus and my worry is on ’17.” The source added that a local union push for the MOX labor cause to congressional Democratic lawmakers would seriously boost the program’s chances of survival, “as long as Alexander doesn’t want to kill it.

Sources spoke on condition of anonymity for this story, because they weren’t authorized to talk on the record.

Reached yesterday, Alexander’s office declined to comment for the record.

A Senate Appropriations staffer said conference negotiations on “thousands of issues” between his committee and House appropriators are ongoing. “We cannot speculate as to the final outcome for programs like MOX or others included in the Energy and Water Development Bill,” Senate E&W spokesman Chris Gallegos said by email this week. Both the Senate and House versions of the fiscal 2016 Energy and Water Appropriations Act would fully fund the MOX project at $345 million, and the House version contains a provision prohibiting the administration from using that money to put the project into cold standby.

More potential good news for the MOX program came this week through the release of a Nov. 16 report by capital project consulting firm High Bridge Associates. The report found that diluting and disposing of the excess plutonium instead of reprocessing the material through MOX could yield 51.3 metric tons of downblended plutonium, presumably to be emplaced at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and potentially forcing a massive re-examination of WIPP’s design basis.

Ordered by CB&I AREVA MOX, the report says disposing of that much plutonium at WIPP would first require revising a 1997 supplemental final environmental impact statement to allow for 51.3 more megatons of plutonium than the 6-megaton design mass in WIPP’s current design basis. Furthermore, High Bridge asserted that disposing of that full amount would demand 171,000 criticality control overpacks (CCOs) be placed in the repository, and that adding CCOs to WIPP could initially increase the average density of plutonium emplaced in the underground facility by 4,200 percent. “As the salt repository closes in on the drums and the drums deteriorate, the plutonium density could likely approach 1,000 times or nearly 100,000% of that in the WIPP design basis,” the report states. “This indicates the serious impacts on WIPP criticality assumptions if the NNSA decides to go forward with the Dilute and Dispose option.”