Days after the Department of Energy said it was cancelling MOX Services’ contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed to appeal the decision directly to the White House.
The local Aiken Standard reported Graham’s comments Saturday
As first reported Friday by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing’s affiliate publication Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the Department of Energy on Wednesday cancelled MOX Services’ prime contract to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
In a termination letter to Rex Norton, the company’s vice president of contracts supply chain management, Greary Pyles, procuring contracting officer for the department’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said the MFFF contract was terminated “”in its entirety” and “effective immediately,” for the government’s convenience.
The non-profit citizens watchdog group, Savannah River Watch, published the termination letter on its website Friday. MFFF is designed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors, per a nuclear-materials-reduction pact signed with Russia in 2000 and amended since.
So far this year, Graham has fought a losing battle on the MFFF front. In an appropriations bill signed last month, the senior senator from South Carolina could not wrangle any more funding for the unfinished facility than NNSA requested to terminate it — $220 million for the 2019 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
If MFFF does close, it could create a sort of MOX dividend for NNSA. The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act directed the agency to use money other than the 2019 appropriation to keep building MFFF — specifically, an unspecified amount of funding left over from previous years. NNSA has acknowledged that funding exists, but has not quantified the amount.
NNSA wants to dispose of the 34 metric tons of plutonium by blending it with concrete like grout and burying deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. As for MFFF, it would be turned into a factory for fissile nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits. To that end, NNSA directed MOX Services’ work force to “refocus their efforts on preserving the [MFFF] construction site in a safe secure manner.”
Graham has never publicly supported switching MFFF to a weapons mission. His office did not reply to a request for comment Friday. MOX Services has until Nov. 9 to submit its termination plan to NNSA, according to the termination letter.
