reu-2018-05-13 plutonium bury or burn
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-plutonium-mox/trump-administration-axes-project-to-generate-power-from-plutonium-idUSKCN1IE0LH
Trump administration axes project to generate power from plutonium
Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration plans to kill a project
it says would have cost tens of billions of dollars to convert plutonium
from Cold War-era nuclear bombs and burn it to generate electricity,
according to a document it sent to the Senate last week.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry testifies to the House
Energy and Commerce Committee on the "Fiscal Year 2019 Department of
Energy Budget" on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 12, 2018.
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo
The Department of Energy submitted a document on May 10 to the Senate
appropriations committee saying that the Mixed Oxide (MOX) project at the
Savannah River Site in South Carolina would cost about $48 billion more
than $7.6 billion already spent on it. The United States has never built
a MOX plant.
Instead of completing MOX, the administration, like the Obama
administration before it, wants to blend the deadly plutonium with an
inert substance and bury it underground in a New Mexico's Waste Isolation
Pilot Plant (WIPP). Burying the plutonium would cost about $19.9 billion,
according to the document, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.
"We are currently processing plutonium in South Carolina for shipment (to
WIPP) ... and intend to continue to do so," Energy Secretary Rick Perry
said in a letter to Senator Richard Shelby, the chairman of the
appropriations committee.
Legislation passed in February allows the Energy Department to advance
burying the plutonium if it showed that the cost would be less than half
of completing MOX.
South Carolina politicians, including Senator Lindsey Graham, have
defended the MOX plant, saying it is about 70 percent complete, would
help keep plutonium out of the hands of militants, and provide up to 600
direct jobs.
South Carolina's Governor Henry McMaster complained to Perry in a letter
earlier this month that the Energy Department's dilution plan is at best
"conceptual." South Carolina, which has already sued the department over
the MOX plant, will "use all legal recourses available" to continue the
program, McMaster said.
The Energy Department has deemed the Savannah site could be used to
manufacture new plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear weapons, an idea
McMaster said was an attempt to pacify South Carolina, but would not
provide jobs for many years.
The Energy Department document estimated that diluting the plutonium
would require 400 jobs at Savannah River through the late 2040s.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist at science advisory group the Union of Concerned
Scientists concerned about plutonium getting into the wrong hands, said
Perry had made a sensible decision. "MOX was a slow-motion train wreck,
and throwing good money after bad simply wasn't an option."
Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Lisa Shumaker