South Carolina sues US Department of Energy over MOX facility budget cut

3/20/2014

By Lenka Kollar

In the fiscal year 2015 federal budget request, funding for the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site (SRS) was cut and now South Carolina is suing the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to bring the project back. The facility is 60% complete and employs about 1,800 workers. The project is over budget and DOE says that the resources aren't there to continue. However, stopping the project would violate a nonproliferation treaty with Russia to get rid of weapons-grade nuclear material.

MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility construction in South Carolina

The purpose of the MOX Project is to covert excess weapons-grade plutonium into commercial fuel for nuclear power plants. MOX stands for "mixed oxide" fuel, mixed because the fuel contains uranium oxide and plutonium oxide, instead of just uranium oxide. Uranium is a naturally-occuring element that is mined from the ground but plutonium is not naturally-occuring. The U.S. produced a stockpile of plutonium for nuclear weapons, but the plutonium can also be used for nuclear energy. Because some uranium in a nuclear reactor turns into plutonium, it is already a proven fuel for nuclear energy. Once used in a reactor, the plutonium fuel becomes too radioactive to use in a weapon.

The MOX Project is a great idea both for getting rid of weapons material and for using existing material to produce electricity. However, the project has taken more resources than expected and thus the DOE has run out of funding.

Do you think that the federal government should continue to fund the MOX Project?

3 Comments

Damon Bryson

3/20/2014 02:42:59 am

Yes, the government should continue to fund the MOX project. The options for plutonium disposition were studied for many years back in the 1990s, and the MOX option was found to be the lowest cost. Other options include building fast reactors to burn the plutonium and mixing the plutonium with high-level radioactive waste followed by burial. Since we short-sightedly canceled the Integral Fast Reactor and the Fast Flux Test Facility in the 1990s, there are no fast reactors available in the USA to burn the plutonium. Mixing the plutonium with HLW and burying it would be costly, wasteful, and we have nowhere to bury it (since Yucca Mountain was canceled). MOX is a proven, safe way to degrade the plutonium so it is no longer attractive for nuclear weapons production, and spent MOX fuel is not significantly harder to recycle or dispose of than spent uranium fuel. As usual, the federal government could not build the MOX plant while remaining within budget or schedule, but what else is new? It is certainly going to be more costly to start over and try something else than to finish up a plant which is 60% complete and get on with MOX. When the treaty was signed with Russia, we were worried about if they would build enough fast reactors to dispose of their plutonium, but they have held up their end of the bargain. They have 3 existing fast reactors and are approaching completion on the 4th. They are much farther along on disposal of their plutonium, and now we are the slow-pokes. The decisionmaking ability of Department of Energy seems very questionable once again.

James Lowry

3/23/2014 01:06:24 pm

Doesn't seem there is much choice if we are to honor our end of the treaty. If we renege on the treaty, where does that leave the Russians in terms of honoring their agreement? Could they also use that as an excuse to renege? DOE is already in violation of Federal Law (the NWPA) by blowing off Yucca Mountain. Do they want to add abrogating an international treaty to their resume of lawlessness?

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