Knox Blogs

March 11, 2016

As noted in earlier post, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is using a $28 million pool of money to stabilize old facilities at ORNL and Y-12 until such time that bigger money and resources are available to tear them down and complete the cleanup.

The National Nuclear Security Administration is doing some work on its own to keep bad situations from getting worse. And, in at least one case at Y-12, EM and NNSA — two organizations within DOE — are working together to reduce the risks.

Sue Cange, DOE’s cleanup manager in Oak Ridge, said the EM team needed to do some roof repairs on the Alpha-4 building at Y-12 in order to stem the internal damage and keep water from spreading the contamination. She said EM was able to borrow a subcontractor that Y-12 had already hired to do roof repairs at nearby Alpha-5 and Beta-4 (facilities that are still the responsibility of NNSA).

According to DOE spokesman Ben Williams, the Alpha-4 roof work will be done under the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Roof Asset Management Program through the Kansas City Site Office.“The current contractor for this program is Technical Assurance,” Williams said.

While DOE has a fund of $28 million this year to reduce risks at the excess facilities, NNSA has a similar fund of about $19 million to do tasks at Y-12, Cange said.

Cange said there are cost efficiencies gained by partnering on projects.,

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UCOR, the Department of Energy’s cleanup manager in Oak Ridge, is managing most of the DOE work on excess facilities.

Cange said there will be some subcontracting to small businesses, including a couple — Strata-G and Alliant — that are part of an existing Basic Purchase Agreement for characterization activities.

Post and Courier

March 11, 2016

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina has formally registered his concern over the Obama administration’s plans to terminate the MOX project at the Savannah River Site.

On Friday, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House co-signed a letter asking the chairman and ranking member of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee not to endorse a government spending bill that doesn’t protect the mixed oxide fuel fabrication program.

The letter, spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, the Republican congressman whose Aiken district is home to MOX, asks that appropriators restore MOX funding for fiscal year 2017 to its current amount of $345 million.

Wilson, Clyburn and others also want the Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill to require that no funds be used to pursue a MOX closure strategy.

Others who signed the letter include South Carolina Republicans Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy and Tom Rice, along with four Republicans in the Georgia delegation: Jody Hice, Barry Loudermilk, Rob Woodall and Rick Allen, all Republicans.

The MOX program was originally launched to reprocess weapons-grade plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel, the result of a 2000 agreement between the United States and Russia to destroy materials no longer necessary in a post-Cold War era. The project is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

The Obama administration wants to halt MOX completely and deal with the remaining excess plutonium via a “dilute and dispose”

approach, which it argues would be faster and cheaper. The White House has tried for several budget cycles to stop the initiative. In Obama’s final budget request he has proposed spending just enough to wind the project down.

Signers of the new letter called the administration’s alternative “irresponsible,” arguing it “include(s) numerous technical, legal, regulatory, and political challenges that the Department of Energy has failed to address adequately.”

While Clyburn’s opposition to the administration’s stance on MOX is not new, his willingness to play a role in the effort now will be helpful in his capacity as a member of the Democratic leadership and frequent ally of President Barack Obama.

The lawmakers’ efforts to put pressure on appropriators in the House also comes just days after the chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee suggested he would be devoting significant time and resources to debating issues surrounding MOX and its future.

Post Register

March 11, 2016

What should we do with all this radioactive waste?

It’s a question Idaho National Laboratory researchers and others in the nuclear energy realm have been asking for decades. Spent fuel and other toxic waste created from nuclear reactors has always been the nasty side effect of a power source that is otherwise clean-burning and consistent.

Jack Law has spent all of his 31-year INL career working on the problem. Law, who manages the lab’s Aqueous Separations and Radiochemistry Department, specializes in developing new ways to treat radioactive waste, and methods of recovering still-valuable elements found in used nuclear fuel.

“The chemistry is very complex,” Law, 53, said Wednesday. “It’s very interesting research, but very challenging.”

Law’s extensive work in the field recently earned him the lab’s prestigious Individual Lifetime Achievement in Science and Technology award. Law’s boss, Terry Todd, who heads up the lab’s Fuel Cycle Science and Technology Division, said the award was no surprise.

“There are only a couple dozen people in the world that have Jack’s knowledge and expertise,” Todd said. “He’s done a lot of things over the course of his career that have been done only a few times, or never done before.”

Law is currently focused on developing new ways to separate out the parts of used nuclear fuel that could be used over again. Pulling out uranium and plutonium from used fuel is one goal. More recently, Law also has been developing techniques to extract valuable actinide elements from the fuel, such as neptunium, americium and curium.

Much of Law’s time is spent developing new “flow sheets,” or the multistage chemical process used to separate out the useful components from spent fuel. In practice, this chemical process occurs gradually in a long, tangled lineup of tubes, nozzles and containers. A pilot version of one such system takes up half of Law’s laboratory in Idaho Falls.

There are other reasons to separate out certain parts of nuclear fuel, too, such as reducing the volume of high-level radioactive waste that will ultimately be disposed of in an underground repository.

Over the years Todd has watched Law develop several successful new technologies for fuel recycling and radioactive waste treatment.

One example, Todd said, was Law’s contribution to a vexing problem at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where several years ago officials were trying to figure out what to do with underground storage tanks that contained high-level liquid radioactive waste.

Todd said Law “went down, consulted, set up equipment, ran some tests in the lab,” and eventually was instrumental in developing a pilot plant that turned the waste into a safer, more stable form. The pilot plant was only meant to demonstrate the treatment technology before a larger facility was built, Todd said, but it has been so effective that Savannah River officials continue to use it.

“He’s quiet and laid back,” Todd said of his colleague. “But under that quiet exterior he’s really a sharp guy. He’s worked with people from almost all the other national labs and several other countries, and he’s really well liked and respected.”

In his three decades at INL, Law, who graduated from Montana State University, has gone from entry-level researcher to manager of his 20-member department, overseeing scientists working at facilities spread out across the desert site.

He’s gradually become a national and international expert in his field, taking a leadership role with the American Nuclear Society and comparing notes on nuclear waste and spent fuel research with scientists from around the world.

Law said he’s aware one of the lingering public concerns about nuclear power is related to his field of study. “The question that always comes up is, ‘Well, what about the waste?’” he said.

“When you explain to people some of the options for disposing of waste, and recycling of components of the waste, it does help them to understand that these issues can be solved,” Law said.

AP: Oregon Live

March 12, 2016

A federal judge has set new deadlines for cleaning up nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, after Washington state went to court to prod the U.S. Department of Energy over the flagging efforts.

U.S. District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson issued the new deadlines in a 102-page order late Friday. Among them: A plant designed to treat low-activity radioactive waste must begin operating by 2022, and a plant to convert the most dangerous waste into glass for burial must be fully operating by 2036.

Washington and Oregon sued the U.S. Energy Department nearly a decade ago over missed cleanup deadlines, and after a settlement, Washington went back to court in 2014, leading to the judge's order Friday.

Peterson criticized the Energy Department for what she described as a "total lack of transparency" as to the delays. She said that if the department had kept the states better apprised of the status of the cleanup efforts, the states could have sought further funding from Congress to help avert delays.

"The passage of time and the urgency of waste clean-up are inextricably linked: the longer that DOE takes to satisfy its obligations under the Consent Decree the greater the likelihood of irreversible damage to the environment," the judge wrote. "No party can 'win' this litigation. The public and environment only can 'lose' as more time passes without an operational solution to the radioactive waste problems at the Hanford Site."

The government used the Hanford site during World War II and the Cold War to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford's 586 square miles house more than 50 million gallons of nuclear waste in 177 underground tanks, many of which are leaking. Earlier this month, workers began removing nuclear waste from a leaking tank at the nuclear reservation's oldest double-shell tank, one day ahead of a state deadline.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson welcomed the court's ruling, which they said in a written statement Saturday will hold federal authorities accountable for the cleanup and which set firmer deadlines than the Energy Department wanted.

"Cleaning up the legacy waste at Hanford is the federal government's legal and moral responsibility to the Tri-Cities community and the Pacific Northwest," Inslee said. "I have been repeatedly frustrated by the delays and lack of progress toward meeting key milestones in waste cleanup and treatment. We cannot consider any further delays, and I am pleased that the court clearly agrees."

The court did not immediately require the Energy Department to build additional double-shell tanks to store waste currently held in leak-prone single-shell tanks, the statement noted. However, the court did say that if the federal government misses an interim 2020 milestone for single-shell tanks under the consent decree, Washington can ask the court to require the feds to build additional double-shell tanks.

The State

March 12, 2016

In her job at the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina, Sandra Black was responsible for looking into concerns raised by employees about everything from health and safety to fraud, abuse, harassment and retaliation.

But in fall 2014, when federal investigators with the Government Accountability Office asked her whether she had the necessary independence to do her job, Black says she answered truthfully: She told them her supervisors had interfered with her work and had tried to intimidate her into changing her findings if they validated employees’ complaints.

Black disclosed her conversation with the GAO investigators to her bosses. A few weeks later, on Jan. 7, 2015, she was fired.

“It is so humiliating and embarrassing,’’ Black said. “It’s hard to come home and tell your family you’ve been terminated after 35 years. It was for no reason other than retaliation for doing my job correctly with integrity.’ ’’

The investigators who questioned Black had been conducting a probe into whistleblower retaliation by the Department of Energy and its contractors at the nation’s nuclear facilities. The GAO is expected to release a report this spring.

Three U.S. senators — Democrats Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward Markey of Massachusetts — had asked the GAO in March 2014 to get to the bottom of persistent incidents of retaliation against whistleblowers reported at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.

The probe broadened to review other DOE sites, including SRS near Aiken, S.C.

“It defies belief that an Energy Department contractor would fire an employee who cooperated with a Government Accountability Office investigation into whistleblower retaliation,” said Wyden, a former chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

“I’m awaiting the GAO’s full report,” Wyden said, “but the firing of Sandra Black under these circumstances demonstrates to me that the culture of retaliation against whistleblowers is regrettably alive and well at DOE.”

Markey said Black’s termination is evidence of a “dangerous culture of disregard for the law” among DOE contractors, including Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the company Black says let her go.

“Rather than rewarding whistleblowers who bravely put their careers on the line to protect public safety, SRNS and other contractors have acted to retaliate against them, sending a chilling message to all employees who bear witness to wasteful, unsafe, or illegal activity,” Markey said. “DOE has historically done nothing to curb this wholly unacceptable behavior.”

In 1992, Congress passed legislation strengthening protections for DOE contractor employees. Since then, the Department of Energy's Office of Hearings and Appeals has decided 116 cases related to whistleblower retaliation at nuclear facilities, according to McClatchy’s review of case files. In 46 of these cases, the whistleblower had raised safety concerns.

This internal mechanism for addressing whistleblower retaliation hears the most cases from Savannah River and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, both with 16 cases, followed by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico with 15.

According to data from the Project on Government Oversight, instances of whistleblower retaliation have only resulted in fines or settlements seven times. Six of these judgments were against contractors at the Hanford Site.

The DOE and SRNS declined comment on the Black case, but said they encourage employees to speak out.

"The Department of Energy is committed to promoting a strong safety culture and a workplace where federal and contractor employees alike are able to speak out, raise issues, or share concerns about safety without fear of retaliation,’’ the agency said in a statement to McClatchy. “DOE expects both its leaders and its contractors to demonstrate a commitment to safety through decisions reflecting safety as the priority."

Troubles in Washington

Hanford is a 586-square-mile weapons complex near the Columbia River in Washington that, like many DOE sites, is a source of community pride. It was a cornerstone of the government’s Cold War effort to produce nuclear weapons.

But some workers – and worker advocates – say Hanford has a problem. Its management doesn’t like whistleblowers, said Tom Carpenter, director at Hanford Challenge, a regional public interest group in Seattle.

“The pattern of reprisal at Hanford is historical, well-documented and has gotten progressively worse,’’ according to a March 2014 report he made to the U.S. Senate.

Last year, Hanford contractor URS agreed to settle a lawsuit by a former employee for $4.1 million in what Carpenter said is one of the biggest public verdicts at the site. The whistleblower case involved questions about the future safe operation of a waste vitrification plant. It was among a number of retaliation cases involving workers who tried to blow the whistle on problems at Hanford, Carpenter said.

Kirt Clem and Matt Spencer say they are among those who have suffered retaliation.

Clem and Spencer were employees with Computer Sciences Corp. at Hanford in 2012, when they reported a defect in an electronic medical records system that made mistakes tracking employees’ medical restrictions. As a result, employees who shouldn’t work in areas where beryllium and other hazardous materials were present risked being exposed

People who are sensitive to beryllium risk developing chronic beryllium disease, a serious respiratory condition that can be fatal.

Clem and Spencer were laid off after raising their concerns with the DOE’s Employee Concerns office and their own managers. The director of Computer Sciences Corp. admitted in a recorded interview that their warnings about the faulty medical records system played a part in her decision to suspend them.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration determined the two men had been improperly terminated. CSC was ordered to pay them $186,000 in wages and post a notice for other employees that retaliation for voicing safety concerns is illegal.

Clem said the ruling was a vindication for him, but the process is still cumbersome.“The whistleblowing

statutes are still broken and the way DOE handles things is broken,” he said.

For example, he said, if the Department of Labor rules in a whistleblower’s favor, the company almost always appeals, as did his former employer, CSC.

In the course of an appeal, Clem said, “people like me have to pay at least the expenses for court reporters and various other things and I think, for us, it’s up to $20,000 or $22,000 now.

“And if a person is still out of work, most people are just not going to be able to afford that, so it’s a default win for the company because people just can’t afford to continue to fight it. These multibillion dollar companies shouldn’t win by default because people can’t afford to defend themselves.”

The process can drag on for a long time.

“For us, it was just over two years, but now with the appeal, it’s been almost three years,” he said. And since the DOE reimburses contractors’ legal fees, the companies can wear down whistleblowers over time, he said. While the department is allowed by law to reimburse contractors for legal fees, Carpenter said it’s a bad practice.

“The DOE has reimbursed many, many millions of dollars to contractors to fight whistleblower cases,’’ Carpenter said

Clem was out of work for a year and took a series of temporary jobs until he landed a permanent position back at Hanford with a different contractor.

He said his former colleagues at CSC see his experience as a cautionary tale. Clem worries that others on the Hanford site are afraid to step forward.

“People are definitely hesitant,” he said. “There have been numerous people we worked with who have said to us they hope we win and they hope CSC has to pay a boatload of money ... but at the end of the day they’re not willing to stick their necks out. They’re not willing to testify because they’re afraid.”

Carolina Dust Up

Similar concerns are found nearly 3,000 miles from Hanford at the Savannah River Site, along the South Carolina-Georgia border.

Black, a 59-year-old Martinez, Ga., resident, said she’s worried workers at the 310-square-mile complex won’t come forward with safety complaints now that she has been let go.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, where she worked, disputes that. In an emailed response to The State newspaper, the company said signs are posted throughout SRS telling employees how to register complaints. They also are told in yearly training sessions they can do so “free of retaliation,’’ the company said.

“Savannah River Nuclear Solutions does not discourage complaints from our employees,’’spokeswoman Barbara Smoak’s email said.

But a whistleblower complaint Black filed with the U.S. Department of Labor tells a different story.

After SRNS won the site contract in 2008, Black said she began to draw fire for passing along valid worker concerns about nuclear safety and environmental compliance, according to the July 2015 complaint.

Black’s job required her to listen to and evaluate concerns from contract workers about unsafe, illegal or wasteful practices. The program, launched in 1992, was supposed to protect employees who raised questions.

Black’s Labor Department complaint, however, said she was pressured by SRNS superiors to close or alter some of the investigative reports – or to disclose the identities of employees who brought up questions.

“They said she wasn’t toeing the line,’’ said Billie Garde, a Washington lawyer representing Black. “They said she wasn’t fundamentally a team player.’’

In one instance, a top SRNS official met with Black every week in an attempt get her to close an investigation of a potentially explosive propane system that employees had questions about, according to the complaint. Her investigation verified the concerns, finding that hazard reviews had not been required before work was performed on the propane system, records show.

In another case, a senior level SRNS official asked her to reveal the identity of the “rat’’ who prompted an investigation of hazardous gas cylinder releases and improper chemical storage. She refused, saying it was vital to maintain a whistleblower’s confidentiality.

Black said she also was told to have one of her investigators change a report. The report concerned a maintenance mechanic’s allegations that some subcontractor employees were not properly trained and could not work safely. The mechanic claimed he had been retaliated against for raising the questions, which Black’s complaint says was true.

What ended her 35-year-career, however, were conversations she had with the GAO, records show. Even though a supervisor had told her to cooperate with GAO investigators, Black says she revealed accurate information that SRNS officials did not want to disclose.

“Ms. Black provided truthful answers, which included details about extremely troubling actions that were being taken by SRNS management .... and interference with certain cases,’’ her labor department complaint said.

Not long after she advised SRNS managers of her discussions with the GAO, she was summoned to a conference room for a meeting. Waiting for her were two human resources representatives, who told her she was being fired “for unsatisfactory job performance,’’ the labor department complaint says.

It was the first disciplinary action she’d ever had as a worker for various contractors at the Savannah River Site, Black said. She also had drawn good reviews throughout her career, including a 1997 performance evaluation that praised Black for successfully resolving concerns about indoor air quality, explosive gases and radiological control, the labor department complaint said.

Since her firing on Jan. 7, 2015, life has been difficult for Black, she said. She can’t find a new job because companies are hesitant to hire a person nearing 60 years of age who has been terminated, she said.

And although Black said her son and many friends have encouraged her, she sometimes breaks down sobbing, and many nights is unable to sleep.

“I cry a lot because it was such a trauma,’’ she said. “I was a very faithful and loyal employee.’’

Frank Matt contributed to this report from Washington.

Augusta Chronicle

March 12, 2016

A report prepared this month for the MOX Services Board of Gover­nors suggests that mothballing the multibillion-dollar mixed-oxide fuel fabrication facility at Savannah River Site in favor of a dilute and dispose option in New Mexico could increase the risk of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.

The March 2 study was completed by nuclear industry consulting firm High Bridge Associates with assistance from Studsvik Scandpower, an international nuclear physics and criticality analysis firm. It argues that the current plutonium packaging endorsed by the Department of Energy could be crushed as salt chambers at the Waste Isolated Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., close up over time, increasing the chance for criticality.

“This will result at a minimum in the release of large amounts of energy and the creation of large amounts of energy and the creation of a large inventory of radioactive fission products that would be available for release to the environment,” the report read. Modeling shows that about 30 percent crushing of one stack of waste – 21 drums holding about 8 kilograms of plutonium – would be enough to trigger a reaction, the report says.

The study rebuts the findings of two others – one by Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research and development center, and the other by industry experts dubbed the Red Team – which concluded that downblending would be more affordable than MOX.

Downblending involves diluting the plutonium with an inert, nonradioactive material, then burying it at the New Mexico site.

Aerospace put the life-cycle cost for WIPP at $13.1 billion and MOX at $47.5 billion. High Bridge estimated WIPP’s actual lifetime cost to be $46.8 billion, with MOX projected to cost $19.4 billion.

“High Bridge Associates has released several reports regarding plutonium disposition based on ill-founded assumptions,” Francie Israeli, the National Nuclear Se­cur­ity Administration’s press secretary, said in a written response to The Chronicle. “Based on informed assessments from the DOE laboratories, the High Bridge conclusions were judged to be simplistic and not credible.”

President Obama has shown little interest in continuing construction of the MOX facility. His fiscal year 2017 budget proposal calls for closing the facility, which is designed to convert weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. Construction on the project began in 2007 but has seen delays and cost overruns. Originally projected to cost about $1.7 billion, contractors say about $5 billion has already been sunk into the project with an additional $3 billion needed to finish it.

The project has $345 million in funding through 2016, which would drop to around $270 million under Obama’s proposal. MOX would be completely shut down by 2021 while the Energy De­part­ment looks to the New Mexi­co site for storage of downblended plutonium.

On Friday, a handful of lawmakers including U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Rick Allen signed a letter to Rep. Mike Simpson, the chairman of the Energy and Water Devel­op­ment Subcommittee, requesting that MOX funding be restored to at least $345 million. The letter also asked that language in the appropriations bill require that funds be used for construction alone, essentially eliminating the possibility that funds could be used in a way that could lead to the facility’s termination.

Construction at the site continues. In a March 2 letter to David Del Vecchio, the president and chief operating officer of CB&I Areva MOX Services, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deemed the overall project performance at the site in 2015 acceptable.

Augusta Chronicle

March 10, 2016

When it came to life after the military, Francesca De Rienzo said she wasn’t sure that she could find a fulfilling career because so much of her identity had been tied up in an 11-year stint with the Air Force.

Air Force veteran Francesca De Rienzo took part in Savannah River Remediation’s Veterans Cooperative Program. She was immediately hired by the liquid-waste contractor after graduating from Augusta University in December.

Now working at Savannah River Remediation, the liquid waste contractor at Savannah River Site, she feels right at home.

“I definitely saw something that was similar in mission,” said De Rienzo, an assistant cost and scheduling specialist. “It has parallels but also a bit of a divide. It’s for the greater good of keeping communities safe, and I think that’s something worth fighting for.”

The one-time staff sergeant is the first to graduate from SRR’s Veterans Cooperative Program, which aims to pair college students with potential careers at the South Carolina nuclear site. The students need only meet two criteria: receive an honorable discharge from the armed forces and complete two semesters of study.

The co-op will then match those transition veterans with jobs at the site that are similar in nature to their field of study, program manager Scott Brown said. The veterans are then paid to work 20 hours each week while working toward their degrees without the guarantee of a job upon completion.

“But obviously, they would have a leg up if they did apply,” Brown said.

De Rienzo, who performed structural maintenance in the Air Force and graduated from Augusta University in December with a management degree, was immediately hired at SRR, where veterans make up at least 8 percent of the work force. She said her previous experience in code matching and supply management made the transition a smooth one. Some of the items she handles at SRS are the same she used when repairing F-16 and A-10 fighter jets.

“It’s something very unexpected, especially if I looked at myself two years ago,” she said. “I was expecting a little more of a struggle.”

The co-op primarily caters to students at four institutions throughout the area: Augusta University, USC Aiken, Aiken Technical College and Augusta Technical College. Brown said eight students recently interviewed for a chance to fill three slots in the seven-person program.

The program length depends on the students, he added. De Rienzo joined late and completed it in about a year. Some of the other students still in the program began in their sophomore years.

“I think it’s been a huge success,” said Brown, himself a veteran. “The veterans obviously love it. It gives them a feeling that even though I’m in school there’s a light at the end of the tunnel as far as transitioning back into civilian life.

“I think if you can go ahead and get the veterans while they’re in school not only does it help them transition, but it also lets you test drive a possible future employee that already has a valuable skill set.”

Augusta Chronicle

March 12, 2016

A report prepared this month for the MOX Services Board of Gover­nors suggests that mothballing the multibillion-dollar mixed-oxide fuel fabrication facility at Savannah River Site in favor of a dilute and dispose option in New Mexico could increase the risk of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.

The March 2 study was completed by nuclear industry consulting firm High Bridge Associates with assistance from Studsvik Scandpower, an international nuclear physics and criticality analysis firm. It argues that the current plutonium packaging endorsed by the Department of Energy could be crushed as salt chambers at the Waste Isolated Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., close up over time, increasing the chance for criticality.

“This will result at a minimum in the release of large amounts of energy and the creation of large amounts of energy and the creation of a large inventory of radioactive fission products that would be available for release to the environment,” the report read. Modeling shows that about 30 percent crushing of one stack of waste – 21 drums holding about 8 kilograms of plutonium – would be enough to trigger a reaction, the report says.

The study rebuts the findings of two others – one by Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research and development center, and the other by industry experts dubbed the Red Team – which concluded that downblending would be more affordable than MOX.

Downblending involves diluting the plutonium with an inert, nonradioactive material, then burying it at the New Mexico site.

Aerospace put the life-cycle cost for WIPP at $13.1 billion and MOX at $47.5 billion. High Bridge estimated WIPP’s actual lifetime cost to be $46.8 billion, with MOX projected to cost $19.4 billion.

“High Bridge Associates has released several reports regarding plutonium disposition based on ill-founded assumptions,” Francie Israeli, the National Nuclear Se­cur­ity Administration’s press secretary, said in a written response to The Chronicle. “Based on informed assessments from the DOE laboratories, the High Bridge conclusions were judged to be simplistic and not credible.”

President Obama has shown little interest in continuing construction of the MOX facility. His fiscal year 2017 budget proposal calls for closing the facility, which is designed to convert weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. Construction on the project began in 2007 but has seen delays and cost overruns. Originally projected to cost about $1.7 billion, contractors say about $5 billion has already been sunk into the project with an additional $3 billion needed to finish it.

The project has $345 million in funding through 2016, which would drop to around $270 million under Obama’s proposal. MOX would be completely shut down by 2021 while the Energy De­part­ment looks to the New Mexi­co site for storage of downblended plutonium.

On Friday, a handful of lawmakers including U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Rick Allen signed a letter to Rep. Mike Simpson, the chairman of the Energy and Water Devel­op­ment Subcommittee, requesting that MOX funding be restored to at least $345 million. The letter also asked that language in the appropriations bill require that funds be used for construction alone, essentially eliminating the possibility that funds could be used in a way that could lead to the facility’s termination.

Construction at the site continues. In a March 2 letter to David Del Vecchio, the president and chief operating officer of CB&I Areva MOX Services, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deemed the overall project performance at the site in 2015 acceptable.