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Converting Plutonium Taking Longer than Expected

Lisa Zagaroli
McClatchy News Service
March 6, 2006

As President Bush seeks to ensure that other countries wanting to use nuclear energy do so without creating weapons-grade material, the United States' plan to reduce its own stock of bomb-quality plutonium is behind schedule and has more than tripled in cost.

The program, referred to as MOX for the mixed oxide blend that would be converted into energy, has been slowed for a host of reasons, including partner Russia's unwillingness to agree to U.S. terms on liability as well as delays and cost overruns in the design phase of the plant at the Savannah River Site in Aiken County, S.C.

There is likely to be a several-year gap between the end of the ongoing test of MOX at Duke Energy's Catawba nuclear plant at Lake Wylie, S.C., and the time the utility can count on using the mixture for 40 percent of its electricity output. The United States won't be producing the mixture for nearly a decade.

"My optimism has been in a steady state of decline," said William Hoehn, Washington office director for RANSAC, an independent organization that promotes a threat reduction agenda between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The United States and Russia settled on the nonproliferation program in 2000, agreeing to reduce the plutonium they have from dismantled bombs by 34 metric tons each. They would do so by blending the plutonium with uranium that commercial nuclear power plants use to generate electricity. MOX blends have been used for decades in countries such as France, but never before using weapons-grade plutonium.

Behind Schedule

To ensure that the mixture would work safely and effectively, the United States asked a company in France to create a blend with U.S. weapons plutonium. The Catawba nuclear facility began testing it in June, and it is working as predicted, said Rita Sipe, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C.

 Of the 193 "lead assemblies" in the Catawba reactor, only four are using MOX. The test is scheduled to run a normal fuel cycle of three to four years. Afterward, Duke had hoped to add more MOX until about 40 percent of its assemblies contained the uranium and plutonium mix scheduled to be fabricated at the Savannah River Site.
But Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told lawmakers last month that the planned fuel manufacturing facility in Aiken County, a 310-square-mile site near the Georgia border, isn't likely to begin producing MOX before 2015.
Bodman's letter to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his department would "continue to explore ways to accelerate its schedule for this important mission."
Construction on the Savannah plant had been scheduled to begin this May, but the National Nuclear Security Administration wouldn't verify the timing last week, saying only that it would begin "in 2006."

Delays in Russia

U.S. officials blame the delay primarily on Russians' reluctance to take on any liability associated with their MOX plant that the Americans plan to help them build and finance. "We have had two years delay on that while we have argued over the terms of liability, and we finally have resolved that matter last summer," Bodman told a Senate committee last month. Former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he thinks the MOX program will continue to progress with "diplomacy" with the Russians.

"The notion of having large quantities of weapons-grade-level plutonium is obviously not desirable to either side," said Abraham, who last week signed on as chairman of the board of Areva Inc., which fabricated the MOX in France that is used at Catawba. The Russian delay is only a small part of the problem with the MOX program, according to a scathing audit by the Department of Energy's inspector general released in December. The report indicates the MOX program has been plagued with huge cost overruns, mismanagement and lack of oversight.

In the meantime, the Savannah River Site, already a steward of the nation's nuclear stockpile, has been collecting more of the nation's plutonium reserves.