South Carolina’s governor reiterated his concerns late last week about the federal government’s continued efforts to end the Savannah River Site’s MOX project, a local elected official said Monday.
The 310-square-mile Department of Energy facility is primarily housed in Aiken County, S.C., near the state’s border with Georgia. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster was in Aiken on June 23 for a meeting with area constituents.
County Councilmember Chuck Smith asked McMaster about the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which is being built at SRS to convert 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear fuel. But President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal would terminate the project in favor of diluting the plutonium at SRS and sending it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico for storage. The proposal falls in line with former President Barack Obama’s attempts to nix the program, citing DOE figures that the MOX route would cost $51 billion – three times the original life-cycle projection when construction began in 2007.
“We had a path forward to get rid of this plutonium and now they’re trying to kill it,” Smith said. “The president wants to zero out MOX and there’s no direct path for this plutonium to leave the state.”
The councilmember said Monday he explained to McMaster that the Aiken area faces an uneasy situation as home to the Savannah River Site. For example, the site houses millions of gallons of radioactive liquid waste dating to nuclear weapons production during the Cold War. That waste currently has no pathway out of the state.
Smith said the governor is equally concerned about the situation. McMaster said he has spoken to Energy Secretary Rick Perry about SRS, the councilmember said, though the governor did not make clear whether that conversation specifically addressed the MOX project.
Completing the MOX facility would represent a promise kept from the federal government to South Carolinians to free the state of the nuclear material, Brian Symmes, a spokesman for McMaster, said Monday via email.
“It has been a priority of Governor McMaster’s since he took office,” Symmes wrote. “The governor will continue to work with South Carolina’s federal delegation and President Trump’s administration to advocate for this important project to be fully funded and put back on track as quickly as possible.”
The state is already embroiled in a legal battle over the federal government’s failure to meet the terms of a 2003 agreement requiring it to by Jan. 1, 2016, process 1 metric ton of the plutonium at the MOX facility or ship it out of state. Neither has happened, and the state is fining DOE $1 million per day, up to $100 million annually.
When DOE failed to make payments, Attorney General Alan Wilson filed suit against DOE in February 2016 in U.S. District Court. On April 20 Judge J. Michelle Childs told the parties they have until July 21 to file a joint statement that details proposed deadlines and schedules for removing the plutonium. The statement may also include details on the monetary claim.
Smith said the entire issue is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding Yucca Mountain – a Nevada site about 100 miles from Las Vegas. About $13 billion was spent on Yucca Mountain after DOE began drilling at the mountain in 1994 and President George W. Bush signed off on the repository in 2002. But that all changed in 2010 when President Barack Obama ordered work on Yucca to cease. Since then, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has said Yucca would be a safe location for the waste.
South Carolina taxpayers invested more than $1.3 billion into the project because the state is one of the few that houses waste that would have been sent to Yucca. “It’s the same thing,” Smith said. “We get a pathway and the federal government takes it away.”
