Only a small handful of the public will likely ever get to see the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) in Aiken, S.C., near Augusta. Here lies the future manufacturing site for most of the nation’s next era of plutonium pits, or the triggers for nuclear weapons.
The tour of five saw just several of 600 or so rooms, full of holes and blast marks, intended to shake off its earlier form. Over two decades ago, construction of the building began to transform used plutonium into fuel for nuclear energy, as part of a nuclear weapons de-escalation agreement with Russia.
But that plant never came to fruition. In 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) decided a different fate for it. Against the original intent of the plant, the NNSA deemed that the same building would instead develop plutonium pits.
And now, it’s full steam ahead.
On Monday, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued its approval of full-scale construction at the SRPPF to produce up to 125 war reserve plutonium pits annually. The Los Alamos National Laboratory will produce up to 80 per year. Both sites will contribute to the nation’s first mass-production of new nuclear warheads since the end of the Cold War, and the radioactive fallout of the Rocky Flats production plant in Colorado.
So far, the DOE has placed a $25 billion “budgetary placeholder” for the SRPPF refurbishment, aimed for completion by the early 2030s.
But these benchmarks seem like an understatement of the uphill battle members of the tour group say they witnessed, in a press briefing following the visit.
“It’s not at all a blank slate,” said nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists Senior Scientist Dylan Spaulding, just days after the site visit in April. “They’re having to rearrange, move walls, open up doorways where they weren’t before. I think the current estimates are probably still underestimating both cost and timeline to do that.”
The group, consisting of a few nuclear watchdog organization leaders, a lawyer, and a nuclear physicist, had won a lawsuit about five years earlier that yielded an Environmental Impact Assessment of nationwide plutonium pit production, plus a tour of the SRPPF.
They received both of those. Since then, they have expressed dissatisfaction with what they have seen, issuing warnings of cost overruns and environmental concerns amid a lack of demonstrated need for production in the first place.
This story comes to The Current GA through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.
