NEW ELLENTON — Aiken County will gain up to 800 jobs over the next five years as a Florida company ramps up production of equipment to handle nuclear materials for the Savannah River Site and others — even as the threat of layoffs next year looms for hundreds of SRS workers.

Flanders Corp. will invest $60 million by the end of 2005 to build the 463,000-square-foot plant. The facility will make “gloveboxes,” which let workers handle radioactive materials safely by placing their hands into a box through shielded gloves and watching their work through a window.

The plant will be about a mile from a main entrance to the U.S. Department of Energy’s complex that once made plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons. Many of the 12,000 workers on the site monitor and clean up radioactive and other hazardous waste.

Local officials expect the Washington Group, which manages the site, will announce plans early next year to lay off 1,200 SRS workers. Workers at SRS have at least four months between a notice and losing their jobs.

Washington Group officials have declined to comment about layoffs but have said the work force will be pared in coming years.

Aiken Mayor Fred Cavanaugh, who spent 17 years working at SRS, said Flanders will help pick up some slack.

“It’s wonderful news for a lot of reasons, and that’s one of them,” Cavanaugh said.

Aiken’s jobless rate of 5.7 percent is below the S.C. average of 6.5 percent in October. But the unemployment rate in nearby Barnwell County is 11.5 percent.

The St. Petersburg, Fla.-based company’s Global Containment Systems subsidiary will hire 300 to 400 workers before the plant begins initial production in January or February 2006. Employment is expected to reach 800 or 900 by the end of 2009.

In addition, Pantec Engineering of Columbia will have as many as 50 engineers working on projects for Flanders, some in Columbia to design the building and some at an office it will open near the plant for equipment design, said Jim Hunter, the company’s president and part owner.

Average wages for Flanders’ management and production employees at the plant will be at least $12 to $14 per hour, company officials said.

“This is about making a material difference in wages for South Carolinians,” said Gov. Mark Sanford, who attended Wednesday’s announcement ceremony here. “This is a great Christmas present to the people of South Carolina.”

The “gloveboxes” can be as wide as 16 feet and as tall as 32 feet. “For that reason they’ll be hard to move on the interstate,” he said.

While the plant will deliver equipment to many other sites across the country, its largest single customer will be SRS.

That was one of the reasons Flanders chose a site within seven minutes of SRS.

Reach DuPlessis at (803) 771-8305 or jduplessis@thestate.com.