nuclear-news

USA’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication (MOX) Facility put on ice

Outsmarting the MOX POGO 7 Mar 14 The Project On Government Oversight is pleased to note that in the President’s FY 2015 budget, released this week, a Department of Energy billion-dollar boondoggle has been put on “cold-standby.” This particular boondoggle would be the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication (MOX) Facility at the Savannah River Nuclear Site in South Carolina.

The MOX facility was designed to convert weapons-grade plutonium into mixed oxide fuel for U.S. commercial nuclear reactors as part of a diplomatic deal with Russia. The budget for the whole project was originally $1.6 billion with an operational date sometime in 2007. But costs have steadily gone up and up as the completion date gets moved again and again. Almost one year ago the Government Accountability Office released a report stating that the cost had risen to $7.7 billion and operations would not begin until November 2019, twelve years after the initially planned start date.

A confidential study recently conducted by the Energy Department reports that yet another cost increase may have been the final nail in the coffin for MOX. The construction costs alone could be as high at $10 billion over the next five years, while operations costs could be an additional $34 billion over the next 15 years.

This astronomical cost increase, in addition to the $4 billion that has already been spent on construction of the facility, is all for a project that doesn’t have a single customer…….http://www.pogo.org/blog/2014/03/20140307-outsmarting-the-mox.html

March 12, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized