The Savannah River Site (SRS) is a federal nuclear reservation on the banks of the Savannah River, twenty five miles from Augusta, Georgia. It is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and operated by the Savannah River Nuclear Solutions LLC. It was built during the 1950s to refine nuclear materials to make nuclear weapons. It has four reactors but none of them are operating at this time. The site contains the Savannah River National Laboratory and the only operational radiochemical separations facility in the U.S. It is the sole source of tritium needed for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
In 2000, the site was selected as the location for a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) manufacturing plant called for by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty that the U.S. signed with Russia. The National Nuclear Security Administration is in charge of construction of the MOX facility which would the only such plant in the U.S. when completed. The MOX facility was intended to be used to convert excess weapons grade plutonium into a fuel that can be burned in commercial power reactors in the U.S. They expected to be able to process as much as three and a half tons of plutonium oxide per year. Construction of the MOX facility officially began in August of 2007. The projected cost of the facility was almost five billion dollars. It was hoped that the project could be completed by 2015.
As of 2016, four and a half billion dollars has already been spent and the MOX facility is only half done. It is now estimated that it will cost from ten to twenty billion dollars more to complete the facility. In 2015, the company constructing the MOX plant asked for a ten year extension of its construction authorization to 2025. Considering the additional costs of operation of the facility, the total additional cost of the project could be as high as thirty billion dollars. Annual operating costs have been estimated at as much as a billion dollars.
It now appears that the Obama administration is preparing to cancel the unfinished MOX project and is only asking for sufficient funding to accomplish an orderly shutdown. Sending the plutonium to storage in the troubled WIPP facility in New Mexico would only cost about three hundred and fifty million dollars a year as opposed to a billion dollars a year for the MOX processing. (The WIPP facility had to be shut down two years ago because of an accident involving the release of radioactive materials but is rescheduled to reopen soon.)
Critics of the project supporting its cancellation point to the long delays and the huge cost overruns. Several analyses of the project claim that it will cost even more and take even longer than now estimated. However, there is political pressure to keep the MOX project going because of the seventeen hundred high paying construction jobs required to build the facility. In addition to domestic backlash, if the MOX project is cancelled, then the U.S. will have to renegotiate with the Russians. Both countries were supposed to dispose of thirty four tons of plutonium under the terms of the non-proliferation treaty.
While I applaud the choice to cancel the project, the WIPP facility will have to be monitored closely to insure that management problems have been solved to prevent future accidents.
Savannah River MOX construction site:
