Pit mission could bring as many jobs as MOX

By James Folker

Posted May 11, 2018 at 7:35 PM Updated May 12, 2018 at 4:00 PM

The picture is still a little fuzzy, but it appears Savannah River Site could get about as many permanent jobs from the relocation of the Department of Energy’s plutonium pit mission as it would have gotten if the mixed oxide nuclear fuel plant was built.

“The net effect could be that there’ll be a few more than MOX would have done,” said Will Williams, the president and CEO of the regional Economic Development Partnership. “Trouble is, we are still a long way away on pits.”

Though MOX could have employed as many as 3,000 construction workers while it was being built, it would have provided about 500 to 700 permanent operations jobs. The pit mission could bring up to 800, Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon said Friday.

MOX was supposed to complete its mission of converting plutonium to fuel for nuclear power generation in 15 years, then those operational jobs would have disappeared, too, Williams noted.

“In effect, we never really got the MOX jobs, so all we’re really losing right now is the construction jobs,” Williams said. “MOX had a 10- to 15-year window where it would operate and then it would be done. Pits will need to be produced as long as we have nuclear weapons.”

But it could be more than a decade before any are made at SRS.

“There is still much work to be done before actually calling pit production a done deal. And that work will be done at higher levels than any of us in this community,” Williams said. “I would also expect some pushback from the contractor building the MOX facility as well as Governor McMaster and Attorney General Wilson. The one constant in all this is our community will continue to advocate for enduring missions at SRS.”

The National Nuclear Safety Administration recommended Thursday that the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at SRS be repurposed to produce plutonium pits, while keeping some pit production activities at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Fifty pits per year would be produced at SRS and 30 per year at Los Alamos, the agency said, and “is the best way to manage the cost, schedule and risk of such a vital undertaking.”

But for anything to happen, Congress has to adopt the recommendation, and it’s unclear when that might happen.

“The dust is going to have to settle,” Williams said.

Greg Mello, the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear watchdog and “disarmament group,” estimates the work couldn’t start before late 2019 or even 2020.

“The ramp-up will be slow. There needs to be planning and design, then the critical decision process,” he said. So far, the federal government has only identified the mission need.

Even if the Energy Department makes a request to Congress to expedite the process, the earliest it could make it into the federal budget is for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2019, Mello said.

Mello, one of many who have criticized Los Alamos for safety problems executing the pit mission, questions whether there’s a genuine need for more pits and calls the new plan the “Superpower Vanity Project.”

“There’s not a single warhead, current or planned, that needs new pits,” he said. “Russia has a big pit factory and we don’t. Russian pits used to have corrosion problems and didn’t last very long. We don’t know if they solved the problem or how much they’re making now.”

The Department of Defense, however, has said it needs 80 pits per year, starting in 2030.

If the mission survives, Mello thinks all the production should go to SRS.

“Los Alamos just can’t do this mission,” he said. “If you really want pits, you’re going to have to do it at Savannah River.”

The MOX project arose from an agreement between the U.S. and Russia to dispose of 68 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium — enough to create about 17,000 nuclear weapons. But the project has been beset by years of delays and cost overruns, over which the state has several times sued the federal government. There is widespread disagreement about how far along the project is and how much more it will cost to finish.

MOX initially was projected to cost $1.7 billion, which rose to $4.9 billion and was further revised to $7.7 billion in 2013. A recent study says that the projected cost is $17.2 billion, but some, in and out of government, have estimated it at $30 billion to $50 billion.