The contractor building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility received less than 9 percent of its possible award fee in its latest performance evaluation, along with a stinging rebuke from the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
The NNSA on Feb. 21 released to Savannah River Site Watch its fiscal 2016 performance evaluation report and fee scorecard for CB&I AREVA MOX Services for design and construction of the MOX facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In the report, the NNSA gave the contractor an overall “satisfactory” rating and 8.9 percent of its award fee, or $267,000 of the total available $3 million for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. It called the contractor’s cost, schedule, and technical performance “unsatisfactory”; for one of three evaluation criteria, integrated project execution, the firm received zero percent of its award fee.
“The contractor was unable to balance project technical baseline requirements with other elements of project performance, such as cost and schedule,” the evaluation said. It also noted a “lack of transparency and openness in external communications with key project stakeholders by the contractor including continued release of misleading and inaccurate project information.”
Meanwhile, the contractor gave itself a 92 percent rating in a self-assessment for the same category.
The MOX facility is being built near Aiken, S.C., to eliminate 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium under a nonproliferation agreement with Russia, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin withdrew last October. The Barack Obama administration was pushing to terminate the project in favor of an alternative plutonium dilution and disposal method Putin said indicated the U.S. was not meeting its commitment under the deal. President Donald Trump’s administration is now responsible for determining the future of MOX.
The latest NNSA evaluation called “patently false” the contractor’s claim that the MOX facility is over 70 percent physically completed.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated in an updated 2016 performance baseline that the MOX facility will cost $17.2 billion to complete, with a completion date of 2048. Meanwhile, CB&I AREVA MOX Services puts the cost at $10 billion and completion at 2029. Much of the difference in the estimates is attributed to different assumptions about escalation of costs throughout the duration of the project.
An industry observer told NS&D Monitor, “It seems pretty clear that this is an Obama-era review of a project Obama officials tried ending but Congress repeatedly continued.”
“Since the project couldn’t be terminated, it looks like DOE is trying to terminate the contractor through unprecedented harsh language,” the individual said. “My guess is once adult leadership gets in place at DOE, this kind of bullying of the MOX contractors and others will stop.”
In the environment, safety, and health component of the scorecard, CB&A AREVA MOX Services earned 88 percent of its award fee, or $132,000. The evaluation said that since August 2010, contractor employees completed over 24 million safe work-hours without a lost work day due to work-related injury or illness. For the safeguards and security component, the contractor earned 90 percent of its award fee, or $135,000.
Several nongovernmental organizations on Wednesday sent a letter to members of Congress encouraging them to discontinue funding the MOX project. The Project on Government Oversight, Savannah River Site Watch, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the National Taxpayers Union signed the letter, highlighting NNSA’s evaluation.
“The evaluation is scathing, and should be the final nail in the coffin for a project that has become nothing more than a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars,” the letter said. It argued that completing construction of the facility “has gone from $1.6 billion to a staggering $17 billion—over 10 times the original estimate. That cost doesn’t include operating the plant over the next 20 years.”
AREVA Nuclear Materials spokesman Curtis Roberts said by email, “While we dispute assertions in the letter, we remain focused on the project and on working with Secretary Perry and his new team in finding a mutually aligned approach, as requested by Congress, to complete this important nonproliferation project.”
SRS Watch Director Tom Clements spoke Tuesday at the ExchangeMonitor Publications and Forums’ annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit, where he highlighted numerous increases over time in MOX plant construction cost estimates and said the NNSA and contractor have failed to constrain expenses.
Jeffrey Merrifield, a former member the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said at a panel discussion alongside Clements that the United States should uphold its commitment to eliminate its share of plutonium, and that the Trump administration can approach the MOX issue “with a fresh set of eyes . . . to reinforce our prior commitment and move forward and complete the MOX facility.”
Merrifield concurred with the 70 percent completion figure and said that “virtually all major components have been purchased for the site,” including the glove boxes, cooling equipment, and piping and diesel generators. He recommended funding the project at $500 million to $600 million per year, along with a rebaseline to update cost and schedule.
CB&I’s corporate office and CB&I AREVA MOX Services could not be reached for comment.
