Nuclear watchdogs received a rare tour of a partially built plutonium recycling facility at South Carolina’s Savannah River federal nuclear site Tuesday, April 21, 2026. (Photo from Savannah River Site fact sheet, May 2022, U.S. Department of Energy)
COLUMBIA — Nuclear watchdogs received a rare tour of a partially built plutonium recycling facility at South Carolina’s federal nuclear site this week.
Speaking at the Statehouse Wednesday following their visit the day before, anti-nuclear and environmental groups claimed efforts to repurpose a mothballed nuclear fuel plant on the site into a facility to replace the plutonium cores of bombs, known as pits, in the country’s nuclear arsenal amount to a drain on taxpayer dollars.
The groups also renewed questions about whether the $25 billion factory under construction at the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site is even necessary.
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On the other hand, the project spells new investment and lots of new jobs for the area — an estimated 1,000 new positions over the next several years.
While on site, the five-person delegation from nuclear watch groups in South Carolina, New Mexico and California, as well as the Union of Concerned Scientists and an attorney from the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, encountered a gutted building where construction crews were actively using water cannons to cut through concrete walls a foot or more thick, they said. Workers had long removed previously installed equipment.
“I think they’re going to have rough going with converting this complicated facility into the new pit plant,” said Tom Clements of Savannah River Site Watch. “The size of the building, height of the ceilings, haphazard nature of the rooms, the thickness of the walls, the vast space to be filled, left me pondering the huge amount of equipment that’s got to be squeezed into the building.”
“I would sum it up by saying that the real story is what we didn’t see,” added Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “Basically, all we saw was this huge concrete shell of a building.”
The tour was part of a legal settlement after the groups sued in 2021 saying the U.S. Department of Energy, the federal agency that manages the country’s nuclear stockpile, didn’t follow national environmental law in developing its plans and failed to account for disposal of excess radioactive material.
In the January settlement, the government agreed to redo the necessary study, taking a closer look at the environmental impacts of such a venture. A public hearing on that study will take place May 5 in North Augusta and written comments can be submitted through July 16.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department’s nuclear arm, in a statement said it “remains fully compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act and is continuing work at the site in accordance with the Settlement Agreement until the Record of Decision is issued.”
The agency statement also called the effort “essential to meeting U.S. national security needs.”
Plutonium decays over centuries. The recycling of spheres of plutonium, called pits, used in nuclear weapons has become a priority over the past couple decades as the country’s nuclear stockpile has aged.
In response, scientists at Savannah River, as well as those at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, have been charged with salvaging usable plutonium from old pits and recycling it into new ones.
Savannah River is expected to make 50 pits per year by 2030. Los Alamos would make another 30 pits annually. But that timeline was considered ambitious to begin with and likely will be further delayed by the legal settlement, which halted some of the proposed construction work and equipment installation.
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“I don’t want to say they can’t do it, but to me, it seems highly improbable that they’ll even be able to produce pits by the middle 2030s. They have a long way to go,” said Coghlan, of the New Mexico group.
Federal scientists have said they have no way of knowing how long the nuclear weapons pits will remain usable. But the Union of Concerned Scientists argues new pits aren’t necessary to maintain the existing U.S. nuclear fleet.
“The claim that we need new pits just to maintain a safe and reliable arsenal just doesn’t hold water,” scientist Dylan Spaulding wrote in a report produced for the group last year. “The reality is NNSA has thousands of existing plutonium pits in reserve and should investigate options for re-use before one more pit is produced.”
Spaulding also pointed to statements in the NNSA’s own study of pit aging, which says plutonium pits have reliable lifetimes of at least 100 years.
The average age of the country’s current pits is now around 42 years.
Savannah River, known to locals as the “bomb plant,” produced weapons-grade plutonium and tritium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War and nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia.
All radioactive production at the site that covers parts of Barnwell, Aiken, and Allendale counties ceased in 1992, when its mission shifted to cleanup and research.
In 2002, sites across the country shipped surplus plutonium to South Carolina that was stored inside the reactor that once produced the radioactive metal.
It was supposed to be turned into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors — mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX — as part of a nonproliferation agreement with Russia in 2000. But the plant to convert the plutonium ran a decade behind schedule and billions over budget.
The Obama administration tried repeatedly to scrap it. South Carolina’s delegation balked, and Attorney General Alan Wilson sued to keep the project going. The fatal blow came from the Trump administration in 2018, when the project was officially terminated.
Clements suggested this new effort to redevelop the building could go much the same way, pointing to a report documenting performance issues the federal government has had with contractors on site.
“We recognize the cost and schedule challenges associated with this project, and under new leadership, we are taking aggressive, urgent steps to correct course,” the NNSA said in response.
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Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
