Bill Richardson was the Secretary of Energy when the Department of Energy began heading down the path to building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, and 15 years later, he’s still a supporter of the project.
Writing in
U.S. News and World Report Jan. 31, Richardson urged the Administration to move forward with the project despite rising costs. “MOX is nearly two-thirds done, and the roughly $4 billion spent already is sunk and gone,” Richardson wrote. “We should use our brief freedom from election year politics to think long term, and not waste the next two years trying to kill what will surely be non-proliferation success story.”
Richardson defended the rising price tag of the facility, which DOE said in budget documents released yesterday is currently estimated to cost $9.1 billion, calling the ballooning costs an “urban myth.” He said the rise in costs “would be astounding, were it true, even for a complex first-of-a-kind nuclear facility. But, there was never any real engineering to support the low baseline number that makes the oft-repeated percentage increase so offensively large. Succeeding management teams at DOE just ran with somebody’s rough stab at finding a starting number. It stuck.”
He also said starting construction in 2007 without a complete design and stringent Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements have hurt progress on the facility, but he said it was time to complete the project. “MOX has been on track for a long time, with its design and growing pains behind it,” Richardson wrote. “When ground was broken in 2007, there hadn’t been any new nuclear construction begun in the U.S. in 30 years. A sophisticated labor force and supply chain had to be built from scratch at great expense, and the president’s all-of-the-above energy policy will benefit for decades.”
