The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Wednesday notified MOX Services that the agency will terminate the company’s contract to build a long-delayed plutonium disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency sent the letter one day after a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction against halting construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which is also known as the MOX project.
“Following the October 9 ruling by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granting a stay of the injunction, NNSA delivered an official notice of contract termination to the MOX project’s contractors and guarantors on October 10,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Friday email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
“This notice is a continuation of NNSA’s actions following the certification submitted to the Congressional defense committees by the Secretary of Energy in May 2018 and the partial stop work order that began the contract termination process,” the spokesperson added. “NNSA is committed to supporting the current workforce and will work with MOX Services throughout this transition process to reduce short-term impacts to workers, the surrounding community, and the State of South Carolina. There will continue to be a significant need for the talented workers at the Savannah River Site to support NNSA’s enduring nuclear security missions.”
Closing the MFFF could result in the eventual loss of some 2,000 jobs at MOX Services. The plant was supposed to cost $5 billion to complete by 2016. MOX Services now thinks it will cost $10 billion to finish by 2029, while the NNSA has estimated it will take until 2048 and cost $17 billion to complete the facility.
The MFFF was designed to turn some 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel, as part of a bilateral arms control pact that called for Russia to purge its stockpile of an equal amount of plutonium. In 2016, the NNSA announced it wanted to instead dispose of the plutonium by dilluting it at planned Savannah River Site facilities and burying the resulting material deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA wants to convert the MFFF into a factory to annually produce 50 nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. South Carolina has resisted that plan, which the NNSA has pitched as a way to preserve at least some of the jobs at the MOX plant.
The NNSA has been fighting to officially terminate the project since the spring. In May, South Carolina filed suit in U.S. District Court to block the agency from halting construction. The District Court judge handed down a temporary injunction in June that did just that, but the NNSA immediately appealed the order.
Then, on Tuesday, three judges in a Fourth Circuit panel in Richmond, Va., lifted the injunction after appearing to accept the federal government’s argument that South Carolina lacked legal grounds to sue the government over the plant in the first place. Federal attorneys said South Carolina’s case was built on the false premise that the NNSA wanted to create a permanent plutonium storage site in the state without first conducting the proper environmental reviews — false, the agency says, because its alternative disposal approach would get plutonium out of the state faster than the MFFF could.
The lawsuit will now continue in U.S. District Court, which had not filed any new notices in the case at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s attorney general, did not reply to a Friday request for comment on the appeals court ruling. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the plant’s champion in the U.S. Congress, likewise did not respond to a query Friday.
The NNSA moved to terminate MOX Services’ contract, awarded to a predecessor company in 1999, a little less than a month after the agency reaffirmed it would exercise its legal right, codified in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed in August, to opt out of building the facility.
Meanwhile, the 2019 NNSA-funding budget bill signed into law in September provided the lowest appropriation for the MFFF in several years: $220 million for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. That is the same amount of funding the agency requested to wind down work on the facility.
The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act specified that the NNSA could add funding from previous fiscal years that has not been spent yet, but that directive would not matter to MOX Services if Congress accepts the decision to opt out of building the facility.
Editor’s note, 10/10/2018, 2:57 p.m. Eastern time: the story was corrected to show NNSA believes MFFF would not be constructed until 2048.
