More MFFF Layoffs as Project Unwinds; Senior Personnel Caught in Wave

The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) swirled more rapidly around the drain this week, as the canceled project’s prime contractor announced more layoffs that will cut across trades, disciplines, and salary tiers at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.

MOX Services will lay off another 70 people on Feb. 4, bringing the total projected job losses at the plant to just over 1,000 by the second month of 2019, according to a notice posted late Tuesday by the nonprofit SC Works organization.

The contractor has to date nnounced two waves of layoffs. The February wave will leave a total of some 440 people without a job, while a January house-cleaning will hit more than 600 workers, according to SC Works. MOX Services previously announced 372 layoffs planned for Feb. 4.

The layoffs will hit everyone from construction workers to very senior managers who report directly to David Del Vecchio, president and project manager of MOX Services. That is according to a source familiar with the layoffs, the details of which have been circulating around Aiken, S.C., for more than a month now. It was not clear which senior managers will be shown the door first.

The MFFF project employs more than 1,500 people. The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Oct. 10 terminated MOX Services’ prime contract to build the facility, following a protracted political battle. The Savannah River Site’s management contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, has said it has about 900 job openings suitable for soon-to-be-unemployed MFFF employees.

The NNSA has said there is about a year’s worth of MFFF closeout work to do. The agency wants to convert the plant into a facility capable of annually manufacturing 50 fissile nuclear-warhead cores by 2030.

The White House wants the NNSA to make 80 those plutonium pits each year by 2030; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would provide the pits not supplied by the converted MFFF. By its own estimate, the NNSA is already on track to miss the 2030 deadline by a few years.

Before it can convert the MFFF for pit duty, the DOE branch might have to perform a potentially years-long environmental impact statement on the plan. Federal judges in one of several pending MFFF-related lawsuits have suggested the agency might need to perform such a review. The congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences last month said such a review would help clarify how well the NNSA’s plan to abandon MFFF will work.

Meanwhile, the slow unwinding of the ambitious MFFF continues on paper as well as on the ground. Earlier this month Del Vecchio asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend the site’s construction authorization, which would free MOX Services from complying with certain regulatory standards and from mandatory inspections by the agency.

The independent civilian agency has some regulatory power at MFFF, which was being built to handle special nuclear material and spent nuclear fuel, and to produce reactor-usable nuclear fuel. Now, because “MOX Services ceased NRC regulated construction,” the company wants the commission to take the shackles off so the MFFF wind down can proceed with less drag.