A Grave Problem with South Carolina’s New Nuclear Warhead

On a crisp evening last October, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), a federal contractor that hopes to manufacture thousands of cores for new nuclear warheads at a Cold War-era weapons plant in rural South Carolina, put on a public information session at a library in the town of North Augusta. The purpose of the event was to address any concern from locals that its plan to produce 50 plutonium pits per year for 50 years would leave toxic waste, including radioactive refuse known as TRU waste, in and around the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site (SRS) that people in towns like Allendale and Aiken find themselves neighboring.

The session included about 30 presenters whom SRNS employs. They handed out Halloween candy while standing beside posterboards laying out what they described as a “cradle-to-grave” process for TRU waste generated by producing those pits. They described a plan to store batches of radioactive waste for only one year in both existing and to-be-constructed buildings around an abandoned nuclear fuel plant at the SRS. The waste, according to contractor employees and a map they displayed, would then be transported in trucks along Interstate 20 through Atlanta, Birmingham, and Fort Worth before reaching southern New Mexico, where it would be buried in an 2,150-foot-deep salt mine called the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP). The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act requires the company to detail those steps, including, crucially, the final “disposition of such wastes,” in order to apply for a local permit to build and operate what SRNS says will be just temporary waste storage buildings at the plant site. An information sheet from SRNS said the company plans for the permit application to be submitted in January and for the new storage buildings to begin construction a year later.

The onus for moving forward or halting the project will fall on the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, which did not respond to questions from Inkstick about how it will respond to a RCRA permit request that includes WIPP as the “grave” for South Carolina’s nuclear waste. An SRNS spokeswoman, Fallan Flatow, told Inkstick that “we would not speculate on what WIPP and the state of New Mexico may decide to accept.”

The coming showdown over SRNS’s TRU waste underscores what has long been a truism of the US nuclear weapons complex: that the government’s urgency to produce new weapons outstrips its commitment to plan and fund the cleanup of the sites across the American landscape that are contaminated while doing so.

That South Carolina’s plutonium pit plant even needs to ask New Mexico for permission to send waste their way until the 2080s or longer stems from the demise of a project that was intended to do the exact opposite of building new warheads. 

In 2000, Russia and the United States reached a landmark arms-control agreement in which each side committed to dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium. They would do so by turning it into fuel called mixed oxide (MOX), usable in civilian nuclear power plants. Then-President George W. Bush’s administration announced that the MOX plant would be built on the premises of the SRS, which had produced 40% of the United States’ stock of plutonium during the last century’s arms race. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the SRS’s five reactors shut down and its mission largely transitioned to cleanup, including of aging and cracking tanks of radioactive liquid waste that the state government would later call the “single largest environmental threat in South Carolina.” The SRS was designated a Superfund site; 43 of those tanks are still awaiting cleanup today. 

MOX represented a turnaround for the SRS, a new mission to beat swords into plowshares. But a major problem lurked behind the project: US power companies didn’t want that type of fuel. And cracks — real ones — began to appear in the MOX facility, like when a whistleblower revealed that rebar, sold by a contractor as nuclear-grade and able to withstand an earthquake, had snapped under the weight of a workman’s hammer. Watchdogs and investigators began to uncover alarming stories of safety lapses and contractors bilking the government. Congress sunk about $5.4 billion into the MOX plant construction, without it ever producing fuel to power a single light bulb, before pulling the plug in 2018. 1,800 local workers got pink slips, and recriminations began pouring in for the conservative South Carolina senator, Lindsey Graham, who had been so closely associated with the project that locals had nicknamed him “Mr. MOX.”

But on the exact same day in 2018 when MOX went under, the Department of Energy announced that it had a new mission for the partially constructed facility: to produce plutonium cores for a whole new generation of nuclear weapons. In 2019, Graham quietly co-authored an amendment to the annual military bill calling for a surge in pit production.

Dr. Rose Hayes watched it all unfold from her perch on a citizens’ advisory board tasked with overseeing cleanup at the Superfund site. “Somewhere along the line, apparently, they realized that if they cleaned everything up, they were sort of going out of business,” Dr. Hayes, a social scientist, told Inkstick. That led local boosters to look for new missions for the SRS, such as MOX and now pit production, she said, adding that she doubts that the SRS will actually be able to produce pits since it has no experience doing the complex task. “They’ve made a lot of attempts or planned a lot of ideas about how to turn it [the SRS] into a site where you have job security.”

That messy history was why SRNS contractors on that October night had the uphill task of assuring locals that they would be responsible stewards of the SRS’s refashioning as a warhead plant, officially called the Savannah River Plutonium Pit Processing Facility.

“We’re not making new nuclear weapons at SRS,” SRNS employee Susan O’Malley said in front of a board titled “SRPPF Mission & Process.” The emphasis was on the word new — O’Malley described the process as similar to smelting old pennies for new coins, since the Savannah River Site would refurbish existing plutonium pits in storage in a plant called Pantex in Texas. 

O’Malley told one local journalist in attendance that “this is only one of 6,000 components of a nuclear weapon. … We’re not making the bomb here.” The characterization exasperated Tom Clements, a one-man watchdog who has spent decades investigating the SRS. Clements told one bewildered local, who said she was attending the session because she was considering buying a large tract of land near the SRS, that the pit facility was “the beating heart of the new nuclear arms race.”

“We’re not making new nuclear weapons at SRS.” – Susan O’Malley, SRNS

Clements and his fellow watchdogs at other nuclear weapons production sites foresaw issues like the uncertain “grave” for the SRS’s future TRU waste. They sued the government agency that oversees the security of the US nuclear weapons complex in 2021, saying it was moving ahead with plans to produce new plutonium pits for warheads at the SRS and Los Alamos without properly evaluating alternatives under the National Environmental Policy Act. A federal judge agreed, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) settled with the grassroots groups, agreeing to perform a multi-year environmental analysis. 

SRNS said at the info session that both processes — the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement resulting from the lawsuit and the application for a RCRA permit — were occurring in tandem. An info sheet it distributed said that both would conclude between late 2026 and early 2027, allowing it to move forward with construction and then actually manufacturing new pits in the early 2030s for a minimum of 50 years — or, into the 2080s and beyond. 

In recent years, the SRS had begun to make some slow progress on removing radioactive waste from those aging tanks, some of which date as far back as 1951, and closing them for good with grout. The SRS calls that cleanup area the “tank farms;” they still contain 33 million gallons of radioactive waste and are set for full closure by 2037, according to a recent update from the SRS. 

But taking on the new mission of pit production could pose a steep tradeoff for locals. Completing its cleanup mission in the next decade would represent an end of an era that started nearly a century beforehand. Pushing ahead with pit production while that newly produced waste does not have a willing “grave” to go to, however, could instead leave a whole new generation of radioactive waste stranded on the premises. 

That scenario was on Dr. Hayes’s mind as she arrived at the October info session. Hayes describes herself as “addicted to studying.” She has five degrees, wrote a book about the politics of nuclear waste cleanup that still is selling copies a decade after it was published, and nowadays teaches a continuing learning course on the topic at the University of South Carolina – Aiken.

Hayes approached SRNS employees, including Robert Watkins, who manages waste transportation, to ask about the “grave” portion of the “cradle-to-grave” plan, including how much waste was expected to be shipped to WIPP.

“‘Well, I don’t know’ was the general answer I got to all my questions,” she told Inkstick. “It’s a shame,” she added, since the site already holds nearly 200 million curies of radioactive waste. “If they explain thoroughly the processes and the potential danger if the processing isn’t done correctly and doesn’t receive adequate funding, the public would be probably more proactive,” she said, since the waste is “sitting in your backyard.” 

Phyllis Britt, the current chair of the citizen oversight group that Hayes once sat on, was one of just a small handful of members of the public who attended the October session. She said a “good group” of locals were concerned about environmental cleanup at the SRS, but that she also thought that planners had learned a lot over seven decades of nuclear weapons production and nowadays “are starting off with this knowledge” of how to manage waste.

Britt also commented on the close company town dynamic that defines much of this corner of the state, which was a rural region of cotton fields, textile mills, equestrian ranges, and health retreats before a US spy plane detected a nuclear test over the Soviet Union in 1949 and the Cold War arms race took off. In a nod to that close relationship, the wing of the library where the info session took place was emblazoned with the name of the company building the pit plant, which had paid for the conference space’s upgrade. 

“Most of the people who are in the direct line are happy about the jobs, about what it’s done for the community, so they say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Britt said of the SRS revamping itself for pit production.

From New Mexico’s perspective, however, another half century of being the country’s sole and permanent nuclear waste dump is not what it signed up for when it agreed to host a “pilot” plant.

Don Hancock, the director of the Nuclear Waste Safety program at Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, said that groups like his have been lobbying the state government to prohibit new plutonium pit waste from ending up at WIPP, and that state officials are “getting in that direction.” New Mexico’s current permit for WIPP runs until 2033, and the state has the authority to prohibit mining of additional underground storage space and also to order the closure of WIPP, Hancock said.

“The name of the project is Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In most, in most English translations, ‘pilot’ means the first, but not the one and only,” Hancock said. He added that the state’s position for decades has been that not all TRU waste nationwide would go to New Mexico. 

A National Academy of Sciences report in 2020 said that WIPP may not be able to legally fit all of the future waste assigned to it, including pit production waste. The Department of Energy has never responded to the report, Hancock said; the June letter from NMED’s Nance called for the department to “address volume calculations” identified in that report. 

The dispute is well known to South Carolinian environmental authorities, according to Hancock, who said that the onus is now on that state’s Department of Environmental Services, which will receive the contractor’s request for waste building permits, to deal with the issue of a final disposal site. Hancock said that he is expecting the Democratic state government in New Mexico to “take some pretty strong action” on the issue before their term runs out next year.

“New Mexico doesn’t tell South Carolina what to do, and South Carolina doesn’t tell New Mexico what to do,” Hancock added. 

Hayes, the social scientist who teaches in Aiken, sees history repeating itself at the SRS. “I keep saying ‘cradle to grave, cradle to grave,’ but that’s never going to happen,” she said.