As the state’s elected officials in Washington maintain a measured approach, local officials in Aiken County, S.C., are going all-in on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to bring plutonium pit production to the nearby Savannah River Site.
In a resolution passed March 5, the Aiken County Council said it “officially supports” the NNSA “decision to use the Savannah River Site as one of the two sites for its plutonium pit production mission.”
The county even called on the state’s congressional delegation to “make every effort to ensure that funding through DOE is secured for this new mission.”
The council signed and stamped its resolution about a month after Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon — whose jurisdiction includes the city but not the county of Aiken — told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor he would welcome a pit mission at the Savannah River Site.
That presents Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who kicked off his re-election campaign this week, with a group of constituents who have moved on from a bitter, ultimately futile, battle to save the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility — the partially completed remains of which the NNSA plans to convert for pit production.
“The re-use of the partially completed and now discontinued Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at SRS will help meet the tight schedule requested by [the Department of Defense] for new plutonium pits,” the Aiken council wrote in its resolution.
Pits are the fissile cores of the primary stages of modern nuclear weapons. The Donald Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, published in February 2018, called on the NNSA to make at least 80 pits a year by 2030.
Last May, the agency officially said it would produce 30 of those annually at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the other 50 per year at the repurposed MFFF .
Congress last year allowed the NNSA to cancel the plutonium disposal plant. The House and Senate Armed Services committees could authorize conversion to pit duty in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.
