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.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. 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."

Source: Economic Times May 13, 2018 13:07 UTC