The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last week notified MOX Services that the agency will terminate the company’s contract to build a long-delayed plutonium disposal plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency sent the letter one day after a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction against halting construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which is also known as the MOX project.
“Following the October 9 ruling by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granting a stay of the injunction, NNSA delivered an official notice of contract termination to the MOX project’s contractors and guarantors on October 10,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Friday email to Defense Daily.
The nonprofit watchdog Savannah River Watch posted the agency’s termination letter online last week. NNSA wants to turn MFFF into a factory for fissile nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits, but South Carolina’s governor and congressional delegation have publicly resisted those plans. The Pentagon says NNSA has to start work on a South Carolina pit facility by early 2019 to meet the Donald Trump administration’s directive to produce 80 new pits a year by 2030 for future nuclear-weapon refurbishments.
“There will continue to be a significant need for the talented workers at the Savannah River Site to support NNSA’s enduring nuclear security missions,” the NNSA spokesperson said Friday.
Closing the MFFF could result in the eventual loss of some 2,000 jobs at MOX Services. The plant was supposed to cost $5 billion to complete by 2016. MOX Services now thinks it will cost $10 billion to finish by 2029, while the NNSA has estimated it will take until 2048 and cost $17 billion to complete the facility.
The MFFF was designed to turn some 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel as part of a bilateral arms-control pact that called for Russia to purge its stockpile of an equal amount of plutonium. In 2016, the NNSA announced it wanted to instead dispose of the plutonium by diluting it at planned Savannah River Site facilities and burying the resulting material deep underground at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The NNSA has been fighting to officially terminate the project since the spring. In May, South Carolina filed suit in U.S. District Court to block the agency from halting construction. The District Court judge handed down a temporary injunction in June that did just that, but the NNSA immediately appealed the order.
Then, on Tuesday, three judges in a Fourth Circuit panel in Richmond, Va., lifted the injunction after appearing to accept the federal government’s argument that South Carolina lacked legal grounds to sue the government over the plant in the first place. Federal attorneys said South Carolina’s case was built on the false premise that the NNSA wanted to create a permanent plutonium storage site in the state without first conducting the proper environmental reviews — false, the agency says, because its alternative disposal approach would get plutonium out of the state faster than the MFFF could.
The lawsuit will now continue in U.S. District Court, which had not filed any new notices in the case at deadline Monday for Defense Daily.
Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s attorney general, did not reply to a request for comment on the appeals court ruling. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the plant’s champion in the U.S. Congress, likewise did not respond to a request for comment about whether he would back a pit mission in MFFF’s stead.
Graham and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) said they will meet with Trump Thursday and ask him to reconsider closing MFFF.