Nobody was really holding their breath Tuesday for the results of the midterm elections in reliably red South Carolina, but some 1,500 workers at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) were still holding their breaths for layoff notices at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
In a late-October letter to employees of the now-canceled project, MOX Services President David Del Vecchio said the company would deliver federally mandated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notices some time in November.
Del Vecchio never said which day, exactly, the WARN Act notices would be sent out. Adding to the uncertainty, South Carolina’s Department of Employment and Workforce does not track WARN Act notices filed by employers in the state.
However, SCWorks.org, which the state agency lists as a partner organization, does — and that group has not updated its list of South Carolina WARN Act notices since Oct. 2. That was more than a week before the Department of Energy officially canceled MOX Services’ prime MFFF constrution and operations contract on Oct. 10.
Whatever it does, MOX Services will not shed its entire workforce in one wave. The company has more than a year’s worth of wind-down work to do, which will require both bearers of institutional knowledge and construction-trade workers.
Federal law requires companies such as MOX Services to send out WARN Act notices 60 days before laying off 50 or more employees in a 30-day period.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors, under a 2000 arms control agreement with Russia that required Moscow to also eliminate the same amount of material.
The Department of Energy says the MFFF is too expensive, and so has proposed diluting the surplus plutonium at planned Savannah River Site facilities, mixing it with concrete-like grout, and burying the mixture deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The agency wants to turn the partially built MFFF into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile warhead cores by 2030. It is not clear how many existing MFFF jobs that plan — which has won support from the Pentagon, but not from key South Carolina politicians — would salvage.