The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Tuesday it has reached a contract closeout settlement with the company that was hired to build and operate a now-terminated plutonium recycling plant at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
The settlement covers all “contract closeout matters” with MOX Services, according to a press release from the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency. The release does not disclose cost and schedule details, but The Aiken Standard newspaper reported that it received information that the settlement is valued at $186 million.
The settlement addresses all legal issues between the NNSA and MOX Services, except “potential claims under the False Claims Act, the Anti-Kickback Act, or for any civil or criminal fraud,” the release says. It does not state which legal issues remain between the two parties.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was being built to convert 34 million tons of surplus nuclear-weapon plutonium into commercial reactor fuel for nuclear power plants. The NNSA had spent more than $5 billion on the project at the time of termination last October, and estimated it would cost another $12 billion to finish building the facility. Construction was expected to take until 2048.
The settlement enables the NNSA to dispose of the weapons-usable plutonium at lower cost to taxpayers, the release says. The method, already being used at Savannah River for a different mission, dilutes the plutonium using inhibitor materials, taking away its ability to produce nuclear weapons. The processed material will be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal. Downblending is expected to cost $17 billion, a third of the projected life-cycle cost for the MOX method.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said in a prepared statement the settlement also enables her agency to proceed with repurposing the MOX plant for production of plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons. By 2030, the NNSA wants to produce 50 pits a year at SRS and another 30 annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
