A delegation of high-profile South Carolina politicians met with President Donald Trump Thursday in Washington to make a last-minute plea to save an embattled plutonium-disposal plant in the Palmetto state — a plant Trump’s own Department of Energy wants to convert into a weapon factory.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) all confirmed in prepared statements that the meeting took place and thanked Trump for hosting. However, the lawmakers did not divulge the substance of the conversation with the chief executive, whose Department of Energy (DoE) plans to cancel construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the agency’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
“The President was certainly open to our comments and our concerns,” Scott said in the written statement. “The fact of the matter is we’re looking for ways to keep the President engaged and not simply allow the Department of Energy to do what they have done in the past which is to use a set of numbers that we simply do not agree with.”
The lawmakers, along with South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) and state Attorney General Alan Wilson (R), spoke with Trump about a week after the DoE terminated the prime contract under which MOX Services and its predecessor companies have been building MFFF. DoE awarded the deal in 1999 and MOX Services broke ground on MFFF in 2007.
MFFF was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors as part of an arms-control pact signed with Russia in 2000, and which also required Moscow to dispose of 34 metric tons of bomb-grade plutonium. DoE says the plant will cost $17 billion to complete by 2048. MOX Services says it will cost about $10 billion to finish by 2029.
When DoE and its contractor last revised the prime contract for the facility in 2012, MFFF was expected to be finished by 2016. Graham spread the blame for failing to build the facility all around, but made clear he wants MFFF completed.
“The MOX program has not been adequately funded by the federal government in years,” Graham wrote in a statement. “I also believe the contractor shares in some of the blame for the MOX program thus far. I remain hopeful we can get MOX back on track with a lower fixed price contract.”
DoE says MFFF is too expensive to complete and in 2016 asked Congress to cancel the plant so the agency could convert it into a factory capable of annually producing 50 nuclear warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. Congress resisted the plan and South Carolina even sued the agency in court to stop the project, but an appeals judge last week ruled that DoE was legally allowed to halt the project, if it wished. A day later, on Oct. 10, the agency sent its contractor a termination letter.
The Pentagon says DoE must start work on a Savannah River Site pit plant by early 2019 to meet the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review’s directive to produce 80 pits a year by 2030 for future nuclear-weapon modernization programs.
Scott, Graham and Wilson, like most South Carolina stakeholders, have yet to buy into DoE’s proposed switch to pits at the MFFF site.
“The bottom line is, we need to figure out how to make this energy either commercially viable or get it out of our state,” Scott said in his statement.
“If DoE moves forward and scraps the MOX program, I will view it as the federal government breaking its commitment to South Carolina,” Graham said. “I will push back and push back hard should they take that action.”
McMaster and Attorney General Wilson did not reply to requests for comment Thursday from Defense Daily.