Staff Reports
WC Monitor
12/4/2015

Congress is pushing for an updated cost assessment of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility following a congressionally mandated independent review this summer that priced the project’s life-cycle expense at $51 billion. Despite controversial hearings in Congress and indications from the Department of Energy that the project is too expensive, President Barack Obama on Nov. 25 signed the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes $345 million for construction of MOX. The facility is being constructed at the Savannah River Site and is expected to convert 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel under a U.S. nonproliferation agreement with Russia.

Spencer Pederson, legislative assistant for Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), said that after talking with Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the lawmaker is “confident” that MOX will receive the full requested funding in the fiscal 2016 energy spending bill. The continuing resolution currently funding the federal government expires on Dec. 11. Citing anonymous sources, the last (Nov. 20) edition of WC Monitor reported that MOX funding would be included in fiscal 2016 appropriations legislation.

“At this point, we’ve worked with Senator Alexander; we’ve been to a number of meetings with both he and Senator Feinstein, and we’re confident going forward that we’re going to be able to keep MOX at the level it was requested in the president’s budget, and continue the good work that’s going on down there,” Pederson said Thursday during a public meeting on Capitol Hill sponsored by the ExchangeMonitor Publications & Forums and the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.

The NDAA includes language that directs DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz to prepare "an updated performance baseline for construction and project support activities relating to the MOX facility." U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (R–S.C.), a MOX advocate, said the language mandates cost and scheduling markers that are used to judge performance for the construction of the project. Re-evaluating the cost and construction baselines will be used to get the contractors and DOE on the same page in terms of costs and timeline, Wilson said.

The NDAA language also requires the Obama administration to use the updated performance baseline for its fiscal 2017 budget request, which is usually released in February or March. Obama’s fiscal 2015 request called for placing the MOX program in cold standby, which would have frozen construction at MOX while DOE officials searched for cheaper methods to dispose of the plutonium. But after a long summer in which the state of South Carolina filed and dropped a suit against DOE for allegedly breaking promises regarding MOX, Congress eventually funded the facility’s construction. 

Obama and Congress will head into upcoming budget talks with the updated baseline as well as details from an Aerospace report released in May that estimated the life-cycle cost of the MOX program at $51 billion. The report compared the MOX method to a downblending approach that would dilute the plutonium enough to safely store it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M. In addition, a DOE Red Team, a group made up of energy officials from various sites, assessed MOX and concluded that it would cost at least $800 million annually to make sufficient progress in completing construction of MOX and disposing of the plutonium. The figure is close to Moniz’s personal belief that the MOX project would cost at least $1 billion a year to be feasible. Nearly $5 billion has been spent on the project to date.

When asked if there are indications that there will be more efforts to shut the program down, Wilson said there will always be naysayers who would like to see the project terminated. The facility is being built in Aiken County, a significant part of Wilson’s district. "I regularly visit the MOX facility to see the level of completion of nearly 70 percent and know the positive impact it has on the Aiken community. I’ve invited other members of Congress who may have doubts about MOX to visit the site with me and see the site for themselves," Wilson said. He added that he is counting on "unbiased baselines" to confirm that completion is important to eliminating the plutonium threat and promoting nonproliferation.

SRS Watch Director Tom Clements, a longtime supporter of canceling the program, said it has been several years since a new project baseline has been conducted for the MOX project. He added that while it is a positive step forward, it’s unfortunate that DOE has not acted sooner on its own in updating the baseline. "The project baseline is supposed to include schedules and parameters related to construction," Clements said. "It has to look at the overall project and whether it can carry out the original mission. I think we’ll see that the MOX project is not sustainable."