South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) expects to meet with President Donald Trump Thursday to plead a case for reversing the White House’s Oct. 10 decision to terminate the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, the palmetto state chief said Monday.
The exact timing of the meeting could change due to how sudden and urgent the matter is, McMaster said Monday during a brief address to the South Carolina Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council at South Carolina State University. McMaster said U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), another staunch supporter of the unfinished, embattled, plutonium disposal plant, was also scheduled to attend the meeting with Trump.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last week notified MFFF prime contractor MOX Services that the agency would terminate the company’s contract to build and operate the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
NNSA sent the letter a day after the U.S. Fourth Circuit of Appeals lifted a South Carolina district court’s temporary injunction against closing the facility. MFFF, which employs some 2,000 people, was designed to fulfill U.S. commitments under a 2000 agreement with Russia that requires those nations to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium.
McMaster said Monday “people more knowledgeable than me” believe MFFF can be completed for less money than the NNSA says it will cost. The agency says it will cost about $17 billion to finish building MFFF by 2048. MOX Services estimates it will cost about $10 billion to finish by 2029. Those estimates include $5 billion in sunk costs since construction began in 2007.
McMaster added that there’s no other feasible way to dispose of the material, though NNSA plans to move forward with an approach it calls dilute and dispose: chemically weakening the plutonium, binding it with concrete-like grout called stardust and burying the mixture at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
“We have an opportunity and responsibility to get this done,” McMaster said Monday. “We’d be making a big mistake getting rid of this project.”
Once MFFF’s disposal mission is canceled, the the government plans to turn the building into a factory for fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits.
