December 13, 2018
By Exchange Monitor
MOX Services will lay off another 70 people on Feb. 4, bringing the total projected job losses at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) to just over 1,000 by the second month of 2019, according to a notice posted late Tuesday by the nonprofit SC Works organization.
MOX Services has so far announced two waves of layoffs at the canceled plutonium disposal plant. The February wave will leave s total of 440-some people without a job, while a January house-cleaning will hit more than 600 workers, according to SC Works. MOX Services previously announced 372 layoffs planned for Feb. 4.
The MFFF at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., employs more than 1,500 people. The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Oct. 10 terminated MOX Services’ prime contract to build the facility, following a protracted political battle. The Savannah River Site’s management contractor has said it has about 900 job openings suitable for soon-to-be-unemployed MFFF employees.
The NNSA has said there is about a year’s worth of MFFF closeout work to do. The agency wants to convert the plant into a weapons production facility capable of annually manufacturing 50 fissile warhead cores by 2030.
The White House wants the NNSA to make 80 those plutonium pits annually by 2030; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would provide the pits not supplied by the converted MFFF. By its own estimate, the NNSA is already on track to miss the 2030 deadline by a few years.
Before it can convert the MFFF for pit duty, the DOE branch might have to perform a potentially years-long environmental impact statement on the plan. Federal judges in one of several pending MFFF-related lawsuits have suggested the agency may need to perform such a review. The congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences last month said such a review would help clarify how well the NNSA’s plan to abandon MFFF will work.
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