Like an old soldier summoned to the front lines, the federal installation known for decades as South Carolina's "bomb plant" may soon return to its explosive roots.

The Savannah River Site, on South Carolina's border with Georgia, is a leading candidate for a $2 billion-to-$4 billion facility to make plutonium pits, the softball-size triggers in nuclear weapons.

For decades SRS supplied the nation's nuclear arsenal with plutonium, producing 36 tons of the metal between 1953 and 1988. Since then the site's chief mission has been cleaning up and stabilizing the millions of gallons of waste left behind.

The Department of Energy is expected to decide in April whether to go ahead with the pit project, and choose from among SRS and four other sites. A public meeting on an environmental study of the pit plant will be held Monday in North Augusta, S.C.

An angry crowd showed up Tuesday near Los Alamos, N.M., another candidate site. The S.C. meeting, however, promises a welcoming parade of politicians, civic leaders and economic-development officials.

At stake are as many as 1,800 new jobs for up to 50 years. SRS now employs more than 13,000 people.

"There is no nuclear Department of Energy site in the country whose community supports it more strongly. I guarantee you we'll have every mayor within 50 miles there supporting it," said Mal McKibben, a retired SRS nuclear chemist. He's now director of the pro-nuclear Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness in Aiken.

An initial screening by the Energy Department ranked SRS second, behind the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other sites being weighed are the government's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; and the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas.

Texas and New Mexico have the support of powerful Western senators, McKibben said.

But SRS has something unique: a 50-year history of handling plutonium.

"SRS is all about plutonium. So I've got to say it looks like the logical choice, if you follow that line of reasoning, which we don't," said Glenn Carroll of Georgians Against Nuclear Energy.

Carroll, like many other opponents, doesn't believe that the most powerful government in the world needs more weaponry. More than 12,000 pits are already stored at Pantex, where nuclear weapons are assembled.

More than 125 advocacy groups urged Congress last month to block the pit plant, saying it would waste money and endanger the public.

Critics worry about the risks of shipping bomb material in an age of terrorism. Apart from its awesome energy, a tiny particle of bomb-grade plutonium-239 can cause cancer if inhaled.

DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration counters that its weapons are aging. While no significant degradation has been detected, an agency report said last month, the nation's nuclear stockpile could become unreliable as impurities and corrosion accumulate.

The stockpile's average age is 19 years. By the time a new pit facility starts full production in about 2020, the NNSA says, some pits would be nearing the end of their 45-to-60-year lives.

The nation hasn't had a source of pits since 1989, when environmental and safety problems shut down production at DOE's Rocky Flats plant in Golden, Colo. As an interim measure, Los Alamos will begin making up to 20 pits a year in 2007. The full-scale plant will make 125 to 450 a year.

"Nobody -- I mean nobody in the world -- does plutonium better," said U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, the S.C. Republican who represents Savannah River.

Plutonium hasn't been SRS's sole mission.

Until the late 1980s, the site also produced tritium, a form of hydrogen that adds power to nuclear blasts and still contaminates its groundwater. SRS now recycles tritium from dismantled weapons, and in 2007 will open a new tritium-extraction facility.

SRS has also been chosen as the site of a new plant to make mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel, using 34 metric tons of surplus weapons plutonium. Duke Energy's two Charlotte-area power plants would burn the fuel. Construction approval is expected this fall.

In contrast to former S.C. Gov. Jim Hodges, who threatened to lie down in front of incoming tractor-trailers bearing plutonium, the new governor, Mark Sanford, is at peace with the bomb material.

Within a week of taking office in January, Sanford met with U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to support both the MOX and plutonium-pit projects.

"From an economic development and quality-of-life standpoint, the governor has been very involved," said spokesman Will Folks. "He sees it as an opportunity for Savannah River to have a new mission."

Enthusiasm fades in some quarters outside the plant's 310-square-mile area, where many of the people who could bear the brunt of a severe accident are poor and minority.

"They're afraid," said the Rev. Charles Utley, community organizer for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, which opposes the plant. "Patriotism is fine and jobs are fine, but good health would supersede both of them."

Utley leads a community group in Augusta, Ga., 23 miles northwest of the site, whose members have complained for years that chemicals from surrounding industries have tainted their neighborhoods.

Workers at the pit plant, if it is built to the largest capacity, would be exposed to radiation that would be expected to cause one cancer death for every 4,900 years of operation, the NNSA environmental study said.

Projected risks of a radiological accident to the surrounding population, it said, include a 0.05 percent chance of one fatal cancer a year.

Few people questioned the government's decision to open SRS in 1950, Utley said, and some see little point in resisting a pit plant.

"Some of the people are kind of getting worn out," he said. "And some say the government is going to do what the government is going to do."

Public Meeting

Savannah River Site meeting: Monday 6-10 p.m., North Augusta Community Center, 495 Brookside Ave., North Augusta, S.C. On the Web: http://www.mpfeis.com/.

THE PROJECTIONS

Cost: $2 billion to $4 billion

Construction jobs: 770 to 1,100

Operation jobs: 990 to 1,800

Output: 125 to450 pits a year

Candidate sites: Savannah River; Los Alamos (N.M); Nevada; Carlsbad (N.M.); Pantex (Texas)

Formal MPF decision, including site: April 2004

Construction starts: 2011

Production starts: 2020

SOURCE: National Nuclear Security Administration