A delegation of high-profile South Carolina politicians met Thursday with President Donald Trump at the White House to make a last-minute plea to save an embattled plutonium-disposal plant in the Palmetto State — a facility the Department of Energy wants to convert into a weapon factory.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), along with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), all confirmed in prepared statements the meeting took place and thanked Trump for hosting. However, the lawmakers did not divulge the substance of the conversation with the chief executive.
The Energy Department last week formally terminated MOX Services’ contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the agency’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. This was the latest, and potentially final, major step in its years-long effort to kill the project. It has already spent more than $5 billion for the facility.
None of the three lawmakers replied to questions about whether they had secured a commitment from Trump to sustain the MFFF. They likewise would not say what action, if any, they asked Trump to take with regard to the facility.
“The President was certainly open to our comments and our concerns,” Scott said in the written statement. “The fact of the matter is we’re looking for ways to keep the President engaged and not simply allow the Department of Energy to do what they have done in the past which is to use a set of numbers that we simply do not agree with.”
The lawmakers, along with South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) and state Attorney General Alan Wilson (R), spoke with Trump about a week after DOE terminated the prime contract under which MOX Services and its predecessor companies have been building the MFFF. The Energy Department awarded the deal in 1999 and the contractor broke ground on MFFF in 2007.
The facility was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors as part of an arms-control pact signed with Russia in 2000, which also required Moscow to dispose of the same amount of plutonium. The Energy Department says the plant will cost $17 billion to complete by 2048. MOX Services says it will cost about $10 billion to finish by 2029.
MFFF was expected to be finished by 2016. Graham spread the blame around for the failure to stay on schedule, but made clear he wants the MFFF completed.
“The MOX program has not been adequately funded by the federal government in years,” Graham said in a prepared statement. “I also believe the contractor shares in some of the blame for the MOX program thus far. I remain hopeful we can get MOX back on track with a lower fixed price contract.”
The Energy Department says the MFFF is too expensive to complete and in 2016 asked Congress to cancel the plant, which the agency wants to convert it into a factory capable of annually producing 50 nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. Congress resisted the plan and South Carolina even sued the agency over it, but a federal appeals judge last week ruled DOE was legally allowed to halt the project. A day later, on Oct. 10, the department sent its contractor the termination letter.
The Pentagon says DOE must start work on a Savannah River Site pit plant by early 2019 in order to meet the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review’s directive to produce 80 pits a year by 2030 for future nuclear-weapon modernization programs. The remaining pits would be produced at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Scott, Graham, and Rep. Wilson, like most South Carolina stakeholders, have yet to buy into DOE’s proposed switch to pits at the MFFF site.
“The bottom line is, we need to figure out how to make this energy either commercially viable or get it out of our state,” Scott said in his statement, referring to plutonium stored at Savannah River.
“If DOE moves forward and scraps the MOX program, I will view it as the federal government breaking its commitment to South Carolina,” Graham said. “I will push back and push back hard should they take that action.”
McMaster and Attorney General Wilson did not reply to requests for comment Thursday from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
MFFF Weaponized in S.C. 2nd District Congressional Race
Wilson took a break from his re-election campaign to advocate for MFFF in Washington this week, despite his Democratic opponent saying the 2nd District incumbent would skip the meeting.
The congressman’s challenger, Army veteran and real-estate businessman Sean Carrigan, said Tuesday his opponent would be “absent from that meeting.”
Wilson’s campaign pushed back on that immediately, telling Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor the congressman canceled previously scheduled campaign events to attend the White House session.
Carrigan’s campaign did not reply to a request for comment this week.
Wilson has never really had a close race since he first won election to Congress in 2001. In 2016, he bested a Democratic challenger by nearly 25 percentage points, according to the website Ballotpedia. His smallest margin of victory since taking office was roughly 7 percentage points in 2008.
