The US Department of Energy has told Congress it plans to cancel an unfinished plutonium fuel fabrication plant in South Carolina that has already cost $7.6 billion and would have cost $50 billion more to complete. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the department instead wants to use the facility to manufacture pits, the plutonium cores that trigger nuclear weapons. The MOX plant (pictured) would have combined surplus weapons grade plutonium with uranium from irradiated reactor fuel to make mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX. The plan was the result of a joint agreement with Russia, originally signed in 2000. Russia ceased implementation of the MOX plan in 2016 as US-Russia relations cooled. No US reactors are designed to use MOX fuel. The 34 tons of plutonium originally designated for MOX will now be diluted with an inert substance and disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The WIPP plant suffered a serious explosion and release of radioactive materials in February 2014 that exposed workers and forced a prolonged closure, costing at least $2 billion. All in all, a story of a colossal waste of money. More