Last year under Mr. Barnes' direction, the Defense Waste Processing Facility cranked out 260 stainless steel canisters packed with logs of glass-encased atomic sludge from more than 40 years of weapons work at SRS.

This year, the factory - the largest of its kind in the world - is on pace to outstrip last year's production total.

To accomplish that, workers are packing 25 percent more waste into each 10-foot-tall canister and have taken a 1.6 million gallon chunk out of the more than 6 million gallons of ketchup-thick nuclear slurry stored in leak-prone steel tanks.

The process of sealing the radioactive slush in glass has a technical title: waste vitrification. In simple terms, it means the factory handles the worst of the worst: strontium-90, curium, americium, neptunium, plutonium.

It's heavy-metal stuff with deadly radioactive potency and, often, multi-millennium half-lives.

"We've got the whole suite of radionuclides," said Mr. Barnes, the project manager of the glass factory, which started radioactive operations in 1996.

There's only one problem with all this button-popping productivity. The ultimate storage destination for all these glass logs, a deep underground vault federal energy officials want to build at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has been stalled by litigation from environmentalists and opposition from politicians, including U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

That means all that progress by Mr. Barnes' factory is rapidly filling up its temporary concrete storage vault, forcing federal energy officials to build a second for $77.38 million with enough capacity to handle another 10 years of production.

About 1,800 of the 2,286 earthquake-proof silos in the floor of the first vault have been filled with canisters of glass logs, Mr. Barnes said. The new building, which will have a look and feel that combines an aircraft hangar with a mausoleum, will have 2,254 slots for canisters.

Environmentalists who oppose Yucca Mountain say this vault is a symbol of the obvious - that those glass logs will be stored at SRS a lot longer than promised by Department of Energy officials and Congress, which designated Yucca Mountain as the permanent storage site in 1997.

"It's a fact there's going to be longer-term storage of those glass logs of high-level nuclear waste at SRS," said Tom Clements, an anti-nuclear activist with the Greenpeace International environmental group.

Even if Yucca Mountain clears the opposition that has stalled the project, the glass logs of SRS waste might take a back seat to nuclear waste with a higher priority, such as the atomic leavings of commercial nuclear power plants.

Utilities have been pumping money into a waste fund and have sued the government to fulfill its promise to provide a permanent storage facility for the waste that has been piling up around their nuclear reactors for decades, Mr. Clements said.

"I don't think those power companies care about that DOE waste," he said.

But South Carolina officials do.

They want that high-level nuclear waste, the byproduct of more than four decades of producing plutonium for nuclear bombs and warheads, shipped out, not permanently stored at SRS.

"Our position has been that this (SRS) would never be a long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste," said Bill Mottel, a former SRS employee who is now a member of Gov. Mark Sanford's Nuclear Advisory Committee. "The high-level waste we generated getting plutonium out of spent reactor fuel - we need to get rid of to the degree practicable."

Mr. Barnes says his factory is doing vital work regardless of whether Yucca Mountain gets approved.

By taking 6,000 gallons of radioactive sludge every week out of those 49 underground steel tanks and imbedding it in glass, the 370 workers in his factory are helping eliminate SRS's biggest environmental hazard. The 36 million gallons of waste is also a big security risk, vulnerable to terrorist attack in spite of SRS' world-class security force.

The glass poured at Mr. Barnes' factory wraps around the radioactive waste and stays in place even if the canister is breached and the log gets shattered. Once those canisters are loaded into the storage vault, they're virtually bombproof and safe from even the strongest seismic tremors, Mr. Barnes said.

"We're putting it in the best form possible to keep it out of the environment," he said. "It's a much better way to store this than to leave it in a slurry mix over in those plants."

While Mr. Barnes' glass-makers have been successful, they are only handling a portion of the waste in the tanks. Much of this waste is a lower-level salt solution that will be handled by a long-delayed Salt Waste Processing Facility to be built at SRS.

Mr. Barnes says he has enough room in the storage vault to keep his round-the-clock operation humming until the Westinghouse Savannah River Co. contract to run SRS expires in 2006.

Yucca Mountain vault or not, he plans to keep rolling.

"We can still be making progress by continuing our mission," he said.

Reach Jim Nesbitt at (706) 828-3904 or jim.nesbitt@augustachronicle.com.