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 Friday 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.
“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.”
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 he 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 spokesperson 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.”
