DOE memo: MOX support could jeopardize other Savannah River Site missions

By James Folker

Posted July 12, 2018

The Department of Energy is signaling to South Carolina authorities that its effort to keep the mixed oxide facility alive could be jeopardizing other opportunities — including the proposed pit mission at Savannah River Site, maybe even its plutonium mission.

A preliminary injunction preventing the National Nuclear Security Administration from terminating the MOX project and moving forward with the dilute and dispose approach to plutonium disposition “also had the practical effect of stopping NNSA from beginning to carry out the preferred alternative of repurposing the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site,” Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a June 29 memo to the Savannah River Field Office obtained by The Augusta Chronicle.

“In light of this injunction, NNSA must re-evaluate the viability to execute enduring missions at the Savannah River Site,” the memo said.

Gordon-Hagerty directed the Field Office to lead a “working group” to evaluate several options and report back with a preliminary report in October and a final briefing no later than Dec. 14.

The options are:

• NNSA takes “landlord” responsibility of SRS and Savannah River National Laboratory. NNSA would retain ongoing and future missions, including tritium operations, plutonium pit production and the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program. Environmental Management, current “landlord” would become “a tenant” and keep responsibility for cleanup activities.
  
  
• NNSA puts in place a separate contract for all mission-related activities. This option assumes NNSA maintains its ongoing and future mission activities and Environmental Management retains landlord responsibility of SRS, including SRNL, and retains responsibility for clean-up activities.
  
  
• NNSA manages tritium operations and will consider relocating tritium activities to another site as infrastructure recapitalization becomes necessary. This assumes that NNSA is unable to proceed with future mission activities, including plutonium pit production and the Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program at SRS.

“The memo makes it clear that NNSA has decided to push back against the save-MOX efforts,” said Tom Clements, who runs SRS Watch. “I think that the judge’s order to keep the MOX going has by necessity caused NNSA to rethink the pit mission for SRS but it’s hard to see how the tritium operations could be relocated given the infrastructure at SRS.”

Greg Mello, who runs a similar watchdog group in Los Alamos — where the pit mission is now located — said the memo seemed “more designed for political consumption than anything else. I am not sure where the show of impatience is coming from, or what benefit it will have.”

He noted that there is no urgency for the pit mission. DOE has said it wants 80 plutonium pits for nuclear weapons a year beginning in 2030.

There’s “no need for decades we believe, leaving plenty of time for political and legal processes to work themselves out.”

On June 7, federal Judge J. Michelle Childs sided with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson and issued an injunction forbidding DOE from stopping all work on MOX just a few days later.

DOE appealed that ruling and it is being considered by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. It has set a September deadline for briefs.

Wilson’s office argued that shutting down the project would leave the state as a permanent dumping ground for plutonium because no other disposal method has been approved by Congress.

Presidents Obama and Trump and Congress have used their budgetary power to try to end the MOX project. The U.S. Senate recently appropriated no money to continue its construction, only for shutdown. The House budget contained $200 million, a fraction of past budgets.

There is disagreement over how complete MOX is today, how much longer it would take to finish and at what cost. Some say it’s 70 percent complete and will take only about $5 billion to finish. Others says it’s only about a third done and will take up to $17 billion to complete.

The MOX facility is designed to turn weapons-grade plutonium into mixed oxide fuel for use in commercial nuclear reactors.