AIKEN — Ginger Dickert held up a mostly empty jar of candy Monday to illustrate why she thinks it is suitable to leave high-level atomic garbage at the Savannah River Site.

The tiny amount represented the relatively small amount of high-level waste the government wants to remain in the site’s 49 steel waste tanks, said Dickert, a cleanup expert at SRS.

By comparison, a large, nearly full jar of candy represented the amount the government intends to clean out of the tanks and ship off to a waste disposal site in Nevada, federal officials said.

“You understand the perspective,” Dickert said.

Monday’s demonstration for the media was part of a full-scale push by the Department of Energy to gain support for a proposal that environmental groups, Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., and former President Jimmy Carter have roundly criticized.

The Energy Department is seeking Congressional approval to abandon nuclear waste the government can’t clean out of the 49 huge waste containers at SRS. The plan allows the Department of Energy to pour grout, a cement-like substance, into the 750,000-gallon to more than 1-million-gallon underground tanks to neutralize the remaining waste.

Federal officials Monday said they will leave only tiny amounts of high-level waste in the tanks. The Energy Department’s top legal council, Lee Otis, led a contingent of agency officials from Washington to SRS Monday.

Critics of the plan say the proposal before Congress is written so broadly that it would allow the government to leave as much waste as it wants in the tanks.

Without approval from Congress, the entire high-level waste cleanup program could grind to a halt in 2008, agency official Charles Hansen said.

Hansen, an assistant waste disposition manager with the DOE, said leaving a small amount of waste in the tanks under the government plan would not be dangerous.

“Our plan is to only leave this small amount of radioactivity here,” Hansen said. “It will protect the citizens. That’s what we want to proceed with.”

He noted that the DOE has already used this plan to close two high-level waste tanks at SRS. The waste gives off a radioactive dose that’s far less than the average South Carolina citizen receives in a year’s time, he said.

But because a federal court curtailed its authority last year, the DOE says it needs Congress to restore authority to close the 49 other tanks in the same way.

High-level atomic waste is among the most dangerous wastes in the world. If people were exposed directly to this waste, it could kill them instantly.

Though SRS officials have contained the waste so far, about one-fourth of the tanks at the site have leaked — some in the past three years.

That threatens to contaminate groundwater, which lies just a few feet from the tank bottoms. The waste tanks also could explode and send radioactivity into the atmosphere.

The 37 million gallons of sludge and salt wastes in the tanks represent the single largest environmental threat to South Carolina today, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

On Monday, the Energy Department spent more than four hours leading tours of SRS waste areas and processing facilities for the media and politicians. During the tour, officials said their plan is the only realistic way to clean up the waste tanks.

U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., told reporters the government’s tank cleanup process “is not some haphazard type of environment.”

Barrett, whose district includes SRS, backs U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s legislative proposal to leave some waste at SRS. He spoke to reporters while standing atop one of the two underground storage tanks the government had already closed with some high-level waste remaining.

“It’s a good solution and one I proudly support,” Barrett said.

Monday’s media briefing drew criticism from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an influential environmental group from Washington, D.C. The NRDC’s successful legal challenge in federal court prompted the DOE to seek to change the law to allow some of the waste to stay at SRS.

“They were trying to do a snow job on the media,” NRDC legislative director Karen Wayland said of the DOE briefing Monday.

Wayland criticized the legislation, pushed by Graham that allows the DOE to leave some waste in the tanks. Graham’s plan has been approved by the Senate as part of the Defense Authorization Bill, but does not have House approval. A final decision may not be made until fall, after the Democratic and Republic Party Conventions, she said.

DOE officials said even if they wanted to leave large volumes in the tanks, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control would not allow that by law. DHEC waste regulator David Wilson said that how his agency reacts depends on individual tank cleanup plans.

Reach Fretwell at (803) 771-8537 or sfretwell@thestate.com.