Energy Secretary Rick Perry ducked and dodged in the first congressional hearing of the year about the Department of Energy’s fiscal 2019 budget, evading questions from the dais about when the agency would provide a congressionally mandated cost estimate that could allow it to cancel a massive plutonium disposal plant under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
In its past three budget requests, the Department of Energy has proposed cancelling the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) and replacing it with currently unfunded upgrades to the site’s K-Area. The MFFF would turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. For fiscal year 2019, the agency seeks $220 million to close the plant, compared with the roughly $335 million it spent last year to keep building it.
The requested K-Area upgrades would dilute the plutonium for eventual burial at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. — an option DOE says is both faster and cheaper than the MFFF. The agency requested $9 million for the MFFF alternative in 2018 and seeks $59 million this year, including funding to shop for new plutonium-handling glove boxes.
Congress has bucked at the idea of canceling the MFFF since DOE came up with it. However, in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law on Dec. 12, lawmakers gave the agency an out: DOE could cancel MFFF, if first it proved there was a substantially cheaper alternative.
At some point after the bill was signed, “we were informed that DOE was pulling together an interim cost estimate” for just such an alternative, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, told Perry during Thursday’s hearing. “When will it be provided to Congress?”
Avoiding the direct question, Perry repeated figures from a 2016 report by the DOE Office of Project Management Oversight and Assessments and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that said the agency’s dilute-and-dispose alternative would cost between $800 million and $1 billion. This approach requires currently unfunded improvements to K-Area that would allow DOE to dilute the plutonium. Burial at WIPP could start in 2028 under dilute-and-dispose, Perry said.
Simpson was unmoved, and said the interim estimate DOE is working on — which he told reporters after the hearing he has not actually seen — might not be be enough to satisfy the criteria last year’s National Defense Authorization Act set for closing MFFF.
In particular, the lawmaker told Perry, the rumored interim estimate apparently does not account for the cost of enlarging the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant — an enlargement Simpson insists Congress must approve — or transporting diluted plutonium to New Mexico for burial.
MFFF Contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services estimates it will take about $10 billion to finish the facility by 2029. That includes $5 billion DOE has already spent on the facility. Perry said on Thursday said the facility would not be finished until 2048 and cost more than $17 billion.
Perry also said DOE was working on a cost estimate for transporting and interring the waste, but that it potentially could be fit in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by changing the way the agency calculates the volume of waste. The Energy Department has asked the state of New Mexico to approve that change, which involves excluding dead space such as air from the calculation used to determine the volume of waste in a container.
That could effectively create more space at WIPP without either mining out new storage chambers or requiring Congress to change the law that governs the deep-underground facility’s size.
The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act permits closure of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility only if the Department of Energy:
- Removes all the plutonium from South Carolina the MFFF was supposed to process.
- Certifies a “sustainable future” for the Savannah River Site.
- Certifies that an alternative to MFFF exists.
- Certifies that any alternative would cost “less than approximately half of the estimated remaining lifecycle cost of the mixed-oxide fuel program.”
Perry could face more pointed questions about MFFF soon from the lawmakers who wrote the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act; he is due to testify in an open budget hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 22.
Meanwhile, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty is set to appear before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee on March 20. There, she could face the same interrogation her boss did Thursday.
