The Savannah River Technology Center is expected to be named a national laboratory today by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

Abraham will be joined by Gov. Mark Sanford and U.S. Reps. Gresham Barrett, R.-S.C., and Max Burns, R.-Ga., for this afternoon’s announcement about the center’s future. While Sanford would not discuss it Thursday, insiders from Columbia to Washington said Abraham would name the center a national laboratory, a prestigious and long-sought designation.

National laboratories, such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee, are major scientific assets that can attract millions of research dollars and investment.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has long sought the designation for the technology center. Graham was scheduled to attend today’s announcement. However, his office said he would remain in Washington for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

A spokesman for Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs the laboratory, said he could not confirm any details about the center’s future.

A national laboratory designation would make the center one of 18 such labs in the Department of Energy system, giving it a stronger place at the federal table vying for money with other laboratories.

Gaining such status would elevate the center from a research facility that supports the Savannah River Site operation to one that would conduct research for use across the federal nuclear weapons complex, said Mal McKibben, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness.

The designation might not create any jobs immediately, but it would make the site more likely to gain new missions that provide jobs to the Aiken-Augusta area, McKibben said.

But McKibben said he did not know what Abraham’s announcement was going to be.

Neither did the S.C. Department of Commerce. Spokeswoman Clare Morris said the agency had not been told, although chief of staff Tim Dangerfield is planning to be at today’s announcement.

The Savannah River Site has had a major impact on the state’s economy for 50 years. But since the end of the Cold War, its employment has been dropping. The site has about 13,000 workers today, down from a high of about 25,000.

For more than a decade, SRS has been involved mostly in cleaning up waste from decades of nuclear weapons production. The site once produced material for atomic weapons, but its last reactor closed in the late 1980s. As a result, many Aiken-area residents are eager for new opportunities.

“Without new missions in the next 15 to 20 years, the population of employees at Savannah River will go down very vastly as the cleanup winds down,” McKibben said. “So a lot of us are working ... to bring in new missions.”

SRS was mentioned as a major asset by Harvard professor Michael Porter in his study of South Carolina’s economy. The Porter study is being used to develop a strategic plan for economic development in the state.

One of the technology center’s strengths is in hydrogen handling and storage technologies. Ralph White, dean of the USC College of Engineering and Information Technologies, hopes the center will be designated a national lab and given a mission involving hydrogen.

USC is already a national center for fuel cell research. The university and Westinghouse Savannah River previously worked closely on hydrogen storage and fuel cell research.

The two organizations signed a memorandum of understanding in March to share resources and expand on collaborative research.

White hopes the announcement means South Carolina will be a focus of developing the hydrogen economy.

But that’s a question mark.

Last week, Abraham announced three Centers of Excellence, headed by national laboratories in Colorado and New Mexico, to receive more than $150 million in hydrogen storage projects.

That makes it less likely the Savannah River Technology Center would be given a national hydrogen mission, said Edgar Berkey of Concurrent Technologies Corp.

Berkey’s company runs the Department of Defense’s fuel cell test evaluation center, and he serves on the environmental advisory committee for SRS.

Berkey believes the announcement likely will be a national laboratory designation. But for the center to make it as one, “it is going to have to become what they call a multipurpose national laboratory,” Berkey said.

The center has a wide range of expertise, including hydrogen energy, nonproliferation and counterintelligence, environmental science, waste processing, homeland security, robotics, and materials technologies.

“It going to have to have a number of different large programs and a number of different client organizations that it serves,” Berkey said.

The center has that now, he said, but it is viewed more as a service organization for SRS. “It doesn’t have the prominence or the prestige that a national laboratory has.”

Staff writer Sammy Fretwell contributed to this report.