In light of substantial cost overruns, an ongoing project to build a MOX fuel plant at the Savannah River Site has lost the support of the White House in its 2015 federal budget proposal.
"Following a year-long review of the plutonium disposition program, the budget provides funding to place the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina into cold standby," read a summary of the proposed 2015 budget released Tuesday. "The National Nuclear Security Administration is evaluating alternative plutonium disposition technologies to MOX that will achieve a safe and secure solution more quickly and cost effectively."
Last year, the administration proposed a $133 million cut to the project's 2014 budget, which was ultimately granted $343 million from Congress. The proposal to mothball the plant entirely follows an internal Department of Energy study uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity last month that estimated its lifecycle cost at $25 billion to $30 billion, plus the $4 billion spent on construction so far. Total construction costs were estimated at upward of $10 billion, which is ten times more than cost estimates when the project started in the late 1990s.
Shaw Areva MOX Services is building the plant based on Areva's facilities in France. It is designed to create reactor fuel using surplus plutonium from the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The budget document did not identify which alternative disposition technologies it is considering. Any new method to make the plutonium unusable for weapons would have to meet the terms of Russian weapons reduction agreements with the U.S.