MOX A ‘MAJOR DECISION’ FOR SENATE APPROPS PANEL, MEMBERS SAY

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) both attacked the Department of Energy’s plans to suspend the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at a budget hearing yesterday with Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. “My point is that this committee told you to build the MOX program. We didn’t tell you to study some other alternative,” Graham said at a Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee hearing, later asking if viable alternatives exist for disposing of 34 metric tons of plutonium under an agreement with Russia. Moniz said that one option may be immobilization. “There is nobody who is going to receive this in an immobilized state,” Graham replied. “The Russians agreed to MOX as the disposition plan two years ago. I don’t know where this is coming from, and I don’t think it’s coming from this Secretary, who’s a very fine man. But this is a major decision for this committee to address.”

 

Landrieu also emphasized the importance of completing the facility. “This is a very important question for this committee,” she said. “This is a very important commitment to world stability and world peace and getting material out of the hands of terrorists. We have a contract with no alternative and an inability, in my view, to renegotiate with the Russians now or in the foreseeable future, and yet this budget is woefully underfunded for a project that’s not only important to jobs here at home, but it’s important to live up to the commitments we have made.”