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![The MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina is 70% complete, but the Administration is trying to kill the project. Russia says that to do so would abrogate a key nuclear weapons treaty. Source: moxproject.com](http://web.archive.org./web/20161209023322im_/http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2016/10/MOX-MFFF.jpg?width=960)
The MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina is 70% complete, but the Administration is trying to kill the project. Russia says that to do so would abrogate a key nuclear weapons treaty. Source: moxproject.com
The MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in South Carolina is under fire again, with the Administration trying to cut its funding and kill the project, and Russia saying that to do so would abrogate a key nuclear weapons treaty.
Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) is a blend of uranium and plutonium (U and Pu) into new commercial nuclear fuel that can be burned in nuclear power reactors but cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.
MOX is one of the pillars of our nuclear weapons non-proliferation strategy, and is the basis of the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) between the United States and Russia. The deal, first negotiated by Vladimir Putin and President Clinton in 2000, committed Russia and the United States to disposing of at least 34 tons of weapons grade Pu by turning it into MOX.
This is an amount of Pu that could be made into about 5,000 nuclear weapons the size of Fat Man that was dropped on Nagasaki seventy-one years ago.
There aren’t many instances where turning weapons into plowshares has worked very well, but nuclear is one of those few. The way to get rid of something like Pu is to let it decay away over thousands of years, or blend it with other materials like U, burn it in a nuclear reactor and make energy out of it.
However, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz wants to stop the MOX project, telling a Congressional panel that the project no longer makes economic sense, being years behind schedule and billions of dollars overbudget.
Yet, the overbudget may not be as large as claimed. A DOE cost study on MOX came out just last week, claiming the cost of construction will be $17 billion. But the best estimate, $8 to $11 billion total cost, comes from the contractor who is actually building the facility. The MOX facility is about 70% complete, and less than $6 billion has been spent on it, so about three billion more dollars are needed, not ten.
Yes, an eight to ten billion dollar facility is a lot of money. But is it really a greater fiscal worry than recovering from a rogue nuclear attack? Greater than going to war with a rogue state? Why do we spend so much on the military and homeland security if it doesn’t include getting rid of potential nuclear weapons? This is about the only time one could ever invoke the mushroom cloud image in support of a policy.
The Obama administration says it would evaluate other ways to dispose of its plutonium, such as downblending and diluting the material, transporting and disposing of it in our only deep underground geologic repository near Carlsbad, New Mexico. However, this alternative may not get permitted by the State of New Mexico.
The U.S. State Department has said this alternative complies with the treaty, but the Russians have said it does not.
MOX fuel is not a new thing. France has been doing it for decades, and MOX fuel provides about 5% of the world’s nuclear fuel. One of the reasons to finish the MFFF is to give America this very important nuclear capability and not leave it to someone else.
Nuclear Energy Institute Chief Operating Officer Maria Korsnick has pointed out that the MOX fuel produced will provide an awful lot of carbon-free electricity, close to a trillion kWhs from this first 34 metric tons of Pu alone, worth over $100 billion. It will also provide 1,700 permanent direct jobs and several thousand indirect jobs.
South Carolina is not happy with this attempt to kill MOX, and has been suing the administration, accusing it of using money earmarked for construction to mothball the facility instead. The State dropped that first suit after the DOE agreed to keep funding MOX, but launched a new lawsuit in February when the new 2017 budget proposal was released and again appears to kill the project.
Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC), and both South Carolina Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, called the Administration’s handling of the MOX program disastrous and the reason that Putin is pulling out of the deal.
Labor Unions have also entered the debate. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America sent a letter to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, voicing concern over the Administration’s desire to kill the MOX project.
Into this fiscal-political fight in Washington comes the American-Russia fight on the world stage. Claiming “a drastic change in circumstances and the appearance of a threat to strategic stability due to unfriendly actions of the United States toward Russia," the Kremlin said it would suspend the PDMA unless Washington cancels all sanctions and slashes its military commitment to NATO allies.
Putin publicly accused the U.S. of failing to live up to its non-proliferation commitments and told journalists that Russia had already built its own MOX-producing facilities to fulfill the treaty. Putin claims that any alternative method, like disposal in New Mexico, would allow the U.S. to retrieve weapons grade material if we wanted.
However, it is unclear whether Russia’s move, or the failure to complete our MOX facility, will have a significant impact on arms control or Russia’s nuclear weapons program. Russia’s new decree states that unprocessed plutonium will not be used for bomb making or other military purposes but then again, this promise is coming from Russia. The real loss to the United States is that Russia won’t have to allow monitoring by the United States or the IAEA.
And it seems likely that Russia will continue to process its own plutonium into nuclear fuel outside the treaty, said Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the United Nations institute on disarmament research and an expert on Russian nuclear weapons.
Russia is also close to commercializing another method that recycles all the uranium and plutonium in spent fuel without separating them, and tops off with some fresh enriched uranium to make a regenerated mixture, or REMIX fuel. Russia may be using this MOX project issue to pull back from these agreements and just make new REMIX fuel of its own.
A similar 1993 agreement allowed Russia to sell blended-down uranium bomb cores to American utilities for use as fuel rods in civilian power plants, in a swords-to-plowshares program called Megatons to Megawatts. This program generated about 10 percent of all electricity in the United States for 20 years, until the U was used up in 2013. The plutonium program, while smaller, still holds the potential to yield enormous energy for civilian power.
Several years ago at the National War College in D.C. on the 20th anniversary of the 1991 bipartisan Nunn-Lugar non-proliferation initiative, President Obama called programs to destroy weapons materials the smartest and most successful of national security programs.
“It took decades and extraordinary sums of money to build those arsenals. It’s going to take decades – and continued investments – to dismantle them.”
The bottom line is - without the completion of this project, we will have no way to carry out our treaty obligations and move a lot of Pu from the weapons column to the peaceful column, in both the U.S and in Russia.
This is a real bargain.