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NRC Greenlights Licensing for Savannah River MOX Facility

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week released a report that deemed the mixed oxide (MOX) fuel facility at the Savannah River site near Aiken, S.C., safe. The 568-page document essentially allows licensing to proceed for the plant to make nuclear reactor fuel from plutonium waste.

The report said that the $4.86 billion facility, which has been under construction since 2007 by a Shaw-AREVA joint venture, would not pose “undue risks” to workers or to the public. Officials now say the facility is on schedule and should be up and running in 2016.

When completed, the facility would be owned by the U.S. government and used to dispose of surplus plutonium and some waste from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) nuclear processes. According to the project website, it will be capable of turning 3.5 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium into MOX fuel assemblies annually. The MOX fuel would be irradiated in commercial nuclear reactors.

The NRC is expected to license the facility for 20 years—though that decision is years away—and operations are anticipated to continue into the 2030s.

The nuclear weapons complex opened in the early 1950s and once produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs. Shut down for more than 15 years, the site was revived after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union began dismantling thousands of nuclear weapons when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s. Because of concerns over the vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons each country possessed, the U.S. and Russian Federation signed an agreement in September 2000, committing each country to dispose of 34 metric tons (approximately 75,000 pounds) of surplus plutonium.

Sources: NRC, DOE, POWERnews

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