The Savannah River Site has a total of 51 waste tanks. Eight of those tanks have been operationally closed. (From Savannah River Site fact sheet, May 2022, U.S. Department of Energy)
COLUMBIA — South Carolina is making a pitch for a federally-backed nuclear fuel and technology campus in the Palmetto State. Nuclear opponents argue it’s an impractical waste of time and money that chases so-far undeveloped technologies.
The U.S. Department of Energy, at the end January, began gauging interest from states willing to host what the federal agency is calling Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.
Following a phone call from Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Jan. 16, 2026, Gov. Henry McMaster tasked the state Department of Commerce to develop a plan for how the state might respond. Commerce has until April 1 to submit its proposal.
In the meantime, Commerce officials are asking state legislators to lend their support to the effort.
“This is not a routine federal solicitation. It is one of the most significant economic and national security initiatives the federal government has launched in a generation, and South Carolina cannot afford to treat it as anything less,” wrote Sen. Tom Davis, the lead sponsor of a legislative resolution voicing support for the effort.
A panel this week unanimously advanced the proposal for consideration by the full Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Beaufort Republican, who is one of the biggest champions for reviving the state’s nuclear efforts, described this proposed campus as “a nuclear industrial city — a large, self-contained complex where every step of the nuclear energy process happens under one roof, in one place, on one expanse of land.”
The federal government envisions complexes containing a nuclear fuels plant, uranium enrichment plant, research and testing of next-generation nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel recycling, nuclear waste storage and an AI data center.
The U.S. Department of Energy has research grants available, but the agency encourages states to seek out private investment to make these developments happen.
“Ideal sites would also provide robust infrastructure and secure physical and cyber systems and demonstrate strong state and local government support … including a willingness to share financial responsibility and provide financial assurances, to the maximum extent permitted by law, for decommissioning, long-term waste management, and site remediation,” the federal proposal documents read.
The Savannah River Site “is purpose-built for exactly this kind of mission,” Davis argues.
The 310-square-mile complex, 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.
SC-owned Santee Cooper negotiates $2.7B payment as part of nuclear reboot effort
The resolution also highlights the $2.7 billion deal struck between state-owned utility company Santee Cooper and a New York investment firm to restart construction on a pair of partially built nuclear reactors at the V.C Summer nuclear power station.
Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch and longtime nuclear watchdog, called any effort to revive activity in the state “half-baked and premature.”
South Carolina has long wrestled with tons of weapons-grade plutonium that have accumulated at Savannah River, suing in 2016 over the federal government’s inability to meet deadlines for its promised removal.
Much of the surplus plutonium from sites across the country was brought to South Carolina in 2002 and 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 with the plant to convert the plutonium years behind schedule and billions over budget, the Obama administration tried repeatedly to scrap it. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson sued, keeping the project going until the Trump administration delivered the fatal blow. The project was officially terminated in 2018.
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A $600 million settlement with the state in fall 2020 gave the U.S. Department of Energy an additional 15 years, until 2037, to get rid of all the plutonium it shipped to SRS. Even if doesn’t, South Carolina can’t sue again until 2042, as per the settlement’s terms.
That left 11.5 metric tons of plutonium underground at SRS, enough to build the bomb dropped on Nagasaki nearly 2,000 times over, The Post and Courier previously reported.
But as interest in nuclear power rises, alongside the development of artificial intelligence and energy-gobbling data centers needed to operate the technology, the president appears to be reversing course.
In addition to the plutonium, the Savannah River Site currently stores more than 33 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste as well as spent nuclear fuel.
Davis suggests South Carolina could turn this burden into a resource, recycling it into new nuclear fuel.
However, the technologies for doing this are still emerging, as are the types of reactors that may one day use the fuel. And it invites the potential for nuclear proliferation, Clements said.
“This whole thing sounds like a fantasy,” he said. “I don’t think it’s destined to go anywhere.
“I think if we approve this and end up moving forward then South Carolina is about to get duped,” Clements added.
Commerce is just in an information gathering phase, according to Cristina Paredes, the executive director of a statewide energy technologies partnership headed by the state economic development agency.
Filling out the federal paperwork does not lock the state into any agreement at this time, she said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
