A longtime lobbyist for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was laid off today as the Department of Energy closes in on its goal of ending the project.
Veteran government-affairs hand Stephen Marlo acknowledged his termination by APTIM in a telephone interview with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
The Woodlands, Texas, company was created by a private equity firm in 2017 from what was the federal services unit of CB&I. APTIM was spun off from CB&I before the latter company, which had been the majority owner of Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) prime MOX Services, was acquired in May by McDermott.
“Today’s my last day at APTIM,” Marlo told NS&D Monitor on Friday — a little over a week after DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially terminated MOX Services’ prime contract to build the facility
Marlo and two other employees near Washington, D.C., were let go as a result of what APTIM Vice President Jeffrey Dorf told the Monitor Friday is a “realigning.” The government affairs work formerly handled by Marlo and his colleagues would be shifted to others at APTIM, whom neither Dorf nor Marlo identified.
The MFFF is designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia that requires Moscow to also dispose of an equal amount of bomb-grade plutonium.
Marlo had lobbied for the MFFF at CB&I before the spin-off and acquisition that brought the MOX Services parent into the McDermott fold. Post-acquisition, McDermott contracted with APTIM for Marlo’s services, Marlo said.
Dorf said APTIM “allowed” that arrangement, but the company itself was not advocating one way or the other for the project. The facility is “not part of our work,” Dorf said.
The NNSA wants to turn the MFFF into a factory to annually produce 50 nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The agency is on the hook to produce 80 pits a year by 2030, under the Nuclear Posture Review the Donald Trump administration published earlier this year. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would produce any pits the converted the MFFF does not, according to the agency.
The NNSA says it needs to make new pits to keep the U.S. nuclear arsenal in service beyond its planned design life.
