When President Harry Truman asked area residents to join the Cold War against the Soviet Union in 1950, they gave up their land so the U.S. government could build a massive nuclear plant on the bank of the Savannah River. People who had once farmed cotton went to work making atomic bombs.
For some, it was the ultimate sacrifice for freedom, made willingly and without question. In return, they enjoyed prosperity that for decades rained down in the form of high wages, brick homes and shiny new Chevys.
More than a half-century later, residents are facing a new challenge. After the government said that it needed a place to process tons of plutonium left from the Cold War, and no one would take it, people around Aiken offered the Savannah River Site for a project converting the discarded weapons material into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.
This time, however, taking on a new nuclear project won’t be as easy.
The conversion plan, which would result in the shipment of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium from Colorado, Texas, Washington and New Mexico, has thrust this cluster of small towns to the center of a national debate over the disposal of nuclear material. The issue highlights growing tensions between federal and state governments as the U.S. moves toward a 2007 deadline to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear arms and convert leftover plutonium into less volatile forms that cannot be used to make bombs.
The battle is being fought from Congress all the way to a federal courtroom in this rural corner of South Carolina, where shut-down reactors are as much a part of the landscape as the meandering Savannah River.
South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges has filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction halting the shipments until the state obtains a legal commitment that the Bush administration will not renege on plans to build a $1.5 billion processing facility and leave South Carolina stuck with piles of plutonium.
Fueling a political war during an election year, the Democratic governor has rejected Republican proposals to set a 2017 deadline for the U.S. to remove the plutonium from South Carolina if it goes unprocessed. The federal government would be fined up to $100 million a year if it did not meet strict processing schedules.
A hearing is scheduled for June 13 in U.S. District Court in Aiken. Barring an injunction, the 18-wheelers could begin rolling two days later with 6 metric tons of plutonium from the former nuclear weapons plant at Rocky Flats outside Denver, Department of Energy officials said. Hodges has ordered the state police on alert and vowed to “lie down in front of the trucks” to block them from entering the state.
“This plutonium is dangerous stuff. It raises serious health and safety concerns if South Carolina is to become a dumping ground for the nation’s plutonium waste,” Hodges said.
The Energy Department, which owns the Savannah River Site, insists that it is committed to the plan to extract plutonium from nuclear bombs and recycle it into high-octane mixed-oxide, or MOX, which is used to fuel commercial power plants. The Bush administration has pledged $3.8 billion to the MOX project over the next 20 years.
Essential to plan
The shipments to South Carolina are essential, Energy Department officials said, to meet the 2006 goal to clean up and close Rocky Flats, part of the government’s long-term plan to shut down former nuclear weapon sites across the country.
“We are trying to support the nuclear non-proliferation goals made with Russia and do what is in the best interest of the environment and national security. We will clean up these sites that are no longer in use,” said Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis. The government proposes to use Yucca Mountain in Nevada for long-term storage.
For many in the Aiken area, the issue is not politics but economics. When the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, the Savannah River Site was no longer needed to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear warheads. Over the last two decades, the reactors were gradually shut down and employment dwindled to 14,000–still the state’s largest industrial employer–but drastically lower than the 38,000 who worked there during its peak. With the new facility, the mission would switch from cleanup to fuel production, creating as many as 800 jobs, officials said.
“We have a long history of patriotism, and the feeling of many people is we want the stuff here,” said Mal McKibben, a retired chemical engineer at Savannah River Site who heads the advocacy group Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness in Aiken. “We want to do our part to safeguard world peace, and it is important to get new missions for SRS that will create jobs.”
But the three-county area surrounding the site has paid a price. The 310-square-mile site contains the longest trail of ground-water pollution in South Carolina, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. spends $100 million a year cleaning up the site.
`Nuclear triangle’
“So much nuclear waste has been dumped around here that people call this the nuclear triangle,” said Don Moniak, an Aiken environmentalist who opposes the government’s plans.
The federal government admitted during the Clinton administration that its nuclear weapons programs were probably liable for some diseases suffered by former workers. More than 26,000 people across America have filed claims for up to $150,000 apiece through the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.
Mervin Russell, 78, of Bamberg, is among those waiting. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1985, and two years ago he came down with lung cancer. He can barely breathe or walk, but he has no regrets.
“It was better than anything we were used to because this was just the country,” said Russell, who worked 30 years welding, driving trucks and handling asbestos. “When the plant opened, minimum wage was 60 cents an hour, and I was making $1.10 an hour driving a truck. … Everybody had money.”
Some residents said they should have a greater say this time in what happens at the site.
“South Carolina citizens are taking on a burden that most of the country will not,” said Danny Black, president of the Tri-County Alliance, which has filed a motion to intervene in the federal lawsuit on behalf of residents. “We ought to have protections under the law to compensate us for that. And we want to have a say in how it’s done.”
