In a paperwork milestone that marks another coffin nail for the canceled project, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Feb. 8 terminated MOX Services’ license to build the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
A 1998 federal law gave the industry regulator responsibility for authorizing construction of the MFFF, which was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors as part of a 2000 arms-control pact with Russia.
MOX Services itself asked the NRC to cancel the construction authorization in November, about a month after the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) terminated the prime contract.
Besides licensing MFFF construction, the NRC would also have licensed MOX Services to possess and use special nuclear material at the site. The agency never exercised that authority, because “construction of the MFFF had not been completed” and “no nuclear fuel or special nuclear material has been brought onto the MFFF construction site,” according to a Feb. 8 letter to Ben Parks, MOX Services’ project engineer, from Andrew Pretzello, deputy director of the NRC’s Division of Fuel Cycle Safety, Safeguards, and Environmental Review.
MOX Services started building the MFFF in 2007. The NNSA asked Congress to cancel the project in 2016, after spending some $5 billion since the turn of the century. The agency cited mounting expenses and a preference to deal with the plutonium under the “dilute and dispose” alternative. It intends to convert the MFFF into a factory to annually produce 50 fissile nuclear-weapon cores called pits by 2030.
In its 2018 contract termination letter, the NNSA told MOX Services to finish “project closure activities” by Oct. 10, 2019. During the yearlong closeout, MOX Services could be required to help plan for a possible future pit mission by aiding “a new design agent selected by the government for continuing design efforts for future NNSA missions.”
MOX Services employed about 1,500 people when construction was in full swing only a year ago. Since January, it has laid off around 1,000 workers.
