Longtime Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility lobbyist Stephen Marlo was laid off on Friday, the veteran government-affairs man told Defense Daily in a telephone interview.
Marlo was let go by Aptim, the Woodlands, Texas. That company was created by a private equity firm in 2017 from what used to be the federal services unit of CB&I. Aptim was spun off from CB&I before the latter company, which had been the majority owner of Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) prime MOX Services, was acquired in May by McDermott [MDR].
“Today’s my last day at Aptim,” Marlo told DD on Friday — a little over a week after the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially terminated MOX Services prime contract to build MFFF.
Marlo and two other employees nearby Washington, D.C., were let go from Aptim as a result of what Aptim Vice President Jeffrey Dorf told Defense Daily Friday is a “re-aligning.” The government affairs work formerly handled by Marlo and his colleagues would be shifted to others at Aptim, whom neither Dorf nor Marlo identified.
MFFF is designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia that requires Moscow to also dispose of 34 metric tons of bomb-grade plutonium.
Marlo had lobbied for MFFF at CB&I before the spin-off and acquisition that brought the MOX Services parent into the McDermott fold. Post-acquisition, McDermott contracted with Aptim for Marlo’s services, Marlo told DD.
Dorf said Aptim “allowed” that arrangement, but that Aptim itself was not advocating one way or the other for MFFF. The facility is “not part of our work,” Dorf said.
NNSA wants to turn MFFF into a factory to annually produce 50 nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The agency is on the hook to produce 80 pits a year by 2030, under the Nuclear Posture Review the Trump administration published in May. The Los Alamos National Laboratory would produce any pits the converted MFFF does not, NNSA has said.
NNSA says it needs to make new pits to keep the U.S. nuclear arsenal in service beyond its planned design life.