White House Displeased by MOX Funding Cuts

The White House last week expressed displeasure with U.S. House appropriators’ decision to deeply cut fiscal 2008 funding for a plant to convert 34 tons of weapon-grade plutonium into nuclear power reactor fuel, EnergyWashington Week reported (see GSN, May 24).

“The reduction of $284 million would result in the termination of construction and procurement activities for the MOX facility and in the layoffs of approximately 500 contractor employees,” according to a June 13 Statement of Administration Policy.

The House Appropriations Committee allocated $167.8 million for the mixed-oxide plant at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a $115 million funding drop from this fiscal year.  Panel members also recommended that the Energy Department “take a fresh look at how the current single-purpose MOX design could be adapted to a more versatile fuel fabrication facility” capable of processing plutonium and producing fuel for reactors built under the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative.

The initiative is a component of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the U.S. program to use proliferation-resistant technologies to convert spent nuclear fuel using into fuel that could be used at power reactors.

The committee’s recommendation indicates lawmakers’ intention to have the Energy Department shift money from MOX to the GNEP program, a Union of Concerned Scientists official told EnergyWashington.  The Bush administration also appears to oppose this move.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership in the energy and water appropriations bill is due to receive $120 million, a $285 million cut from the White House request.

The United States initiated the MOX program in 2000 alongside Russia, which was also to build a facility to eliminate an equal amount of plutonium.  The Energy Department has moved ahead with the program, while Moscow has delayed construction and expressed its preference for using the plutonium as fuel for fast-breeder reactors.

“The ever-increasing project cost baseline warrants a real-time project management oversight function performed by a group outside of the department, as the MOX facility goes into construction phase,” according to the Appropriations Committee, which also called for Government Accountability Office oversight of the project.

The panel “tried to kill the MOX program altogether in 2007” but ran into resistance from South Carolina Democratic lawmakers, the UCS official said.  “Now they are trying to introduce maximum accountability” (Anastasia Gnezditskaia, EnergyWashington Week, June 20).

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