Members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation this week got on board with constituents’ calls for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to start manufacturing nuclear-warhead cores at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R) say the pit mission — currently entrenched at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — should be added to the massive plutonium-disarmament mission planned for Savannah River’s still-under-construction Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF).
The NNSA has studied repurposing MFFF as a pit-production plant, which the agency said could be a cheaper, faster way to boost production to the 80 pits a year the Pentagon says it needs by the 2030s to keep U.S. nuclear weapons as lethal as they are supposed to be.
A spokesperson confirmed Tuesday that Graham wants both MFFF and pit work at Savannah River. The senator staked out that position in a Monday meeting of the Aiken Rotary Club, as first reported by the Aiken Standard.
Graham spoke only days after Wilson told the Standard that bringing the pit mission to Savannah River would not crowd out MFFF. A spokesperson for Wilson, whose 2nd Congressional District includes SRS, did not reply to a request for comment Tuesday.
The city and county of Aiken both passed resolutions last month urging the NNSA to relocate pit production to Savannah River without canceling MFFF’s current mission to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel.
The Donald Trump administration wants to cancel the MOX project and instead spend hundreds of millions of dollars to modify existing systems at Savannah River so it can dilute the plutonium for eventual underground disposal at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
That plan has placed DOE at odds with South Carolina’s lawmakers and prime MFFF contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services. The company and its customer are embroiled in a federal lawsuit in which CB&I alleged the NNSA essentially sabotaged the project through mismanagement and bad-faith negotiations.
