The management and operations contractor for the Savannah River Site has finalized a plan to assume responsibility for crucial components of the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF): the controversial plutonium disposal plant that was, until October, to be built at the site.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the milestone in a press release just before the Christmas holiday. The agency canceled the project after years of political and legal battles — some of which are still raging in federal courts in South Carolina and Nevada.
The MFFF, which contractor MOX Services was building at the Savannah River Site, was to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel under a 2000 arms control agreement with Russia. Now that it has been terminated — after running billions of dollars over budget and being forecast to take years longer to complete than anticipated — the Fluor-led Savannah River site contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, will become the steward of the shuttered facility.
“Savannah River Nuclear Solutions transmitted the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MOX) transition plan to NNSA today for review and approval,” the NNSA’s public affairs office wrote in an unsolicited Dec. 21 statement. “This plan is required as part of the wind down of the MOX project and it defines the timeline for transition and turnover of MOX contract facilities, equipment, materials, government property, documents, and records for future use.”
An NNSA spokesperson in Washington did not immediately reply this week to a request for details of the transition plan.
The NNSA plans to turn the MFFF into a facility to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The plan is not a lock yet, as it still needs funding from Congress that cannot be secured for at least another year. The White House could offer details about the cost of coverting MFFF for pit duty in its 2020 budget request, which is nominally to be published in the first week of February.
Meanwhile, planned pit facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are also intended to be capable of running in a “surge capacity” to cover the NNSA’s pit needs without help from a converted MFFF. The White House wants the NNSA to make a total of 80 pits a year by 2030.
