Nuclear trigger plant divides SRS community

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More than 500 people attended the meeting at the North Augusta Community Center. The crowd was about evenly split between supporters and opponents.

In addition to the Savannah River Site, the government is considering facilities at Los Alamos and Carlsbad in New Mexico; the Nevada Test Site; and the Pantex facility in Texas for the nuclear triggers plant.

Plant supporters here Monday included business leaders, retired workers and politicians in the surrounding community.

"This is a good facility," Barry Adams, a banker from Aiken, said in an interview. "It's good for the economy and it's the right thing to do for the nation."

Opponents came from across the Southeast to warn of potential hazards of the proposed plant.

Susan Bloomfield, an Augusta resident and member of the Georgia Sierra Club, said in an interview she was concerned about the "reckless waste of taxpayer dollars."

"This facility should not be built either here or anywhere," she said. "Our elected officials and the Chamber of Commerce need to bring jobs into this area that will protect our children's future, not endanger it."

The government wants to build a modern pit facility — a plant that would manufacture small balls of plutonium that act as a trigger for nuclear weapons. The plutonium pit is one of 5,000 components of a modern nuclear weapon.

Under the Department of Energy proposal, the plant would start operating in 2020. It would be in use for 50 years and cost up to $4.4 billion. The plant could produce 125 to 450 nuclear plutonium triggers per year, according to DOE estimates.

Officials estimate as many as 1,100 jobs would be created during the heaviest phase of construction for the new trigger plant. Once it is operating, employment would increase to 1,800 jobs.

Construction is scheduled to begin in 2011.

Government presenters said the SRS already has the electricity infrastructure and water resources needed for the plant.

Supporters and opponents at the meeting carried on a polite but passionate debate on whether the country needs the plant.

Protesters carried fans with words from John Lennon's song, "Imagine." Some performed peace dances in a park across the street from the community center. One even brought a three-foot recreation of "Blinky," the three-eyed fish that lives in the nuclear cooling pond in the TV show, the Simpsons.

Sarah Barczak, 30, drove from Savannah to voice her opposition to the plant. She said she's tired of living downstream from the environmental damage done at SRS.

"How can we afford a new plant that will create more waste? Radioactive materials are almost all long-lived and will be passed on for generations," she said.

Bill Robinson, 53, of Allendale, said he took an early retirement from SRS. He came to the meeting to support the new plant. He said the United States needs a strong deterrent to future threats.

"Weapons of mass destruction will not go away," he said.

Third District U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett told The Greenville News that the Savannah River Site needs to seek out new missions in order to maintain a stable work force in the Aiken area.

"The focus of the site right now is environmental cleanup, but that has an end," he said.

Monday night's meeting in North Augusta is the fifth of six public hearings in communities that might host the plant. A final environmental impact report is expected in 2004.

President Bush has committed to cutting the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the year 2012. More than 12,000 triggers are now being stored at the Pantex facility.

Anti-nuclear activists say a new plant isn't needed. But the government says it's critical to national security because scientists do not fully understand how plutonium degrades over time.

The National Nuclear Security Administration believes the triggers can remain viable for 45 years. If the new plant opens by 2020, the average age of the triggers in the nuclear arsenal will be 30 years, according to the new facility's environmental impact statement.

SRS has already been selected for a plant to convert weapons grade plutonium for use in commercial nuclear power reactors. The fuel is called mixed oxide, or MOX. Between the two projects, nuclear production could produce 3,100 new jobs, according to DOE estimates.

The MOX facility will also cost about $4 billion to build and is expected to create 1,300 jobs.

If the trigger plant is built at SRS it will mean an unknown number of plutonium shipments to and from the site until 2070.

The 310-square-mile SRS, about 20 miles south of Aiken, produces much of the plutonium already in the nuclear arsenal. It stopped production in 1989, when the last of its five reactors closed.

That year the country also stopped producing nuclear triggers at Rocky Flats in Golden, Colo. Six tons of plutonium is currently being shipped from Rocky Flats to SRS.

Since 1989, workers at SRS have been cleaning up pollution left from 50 years of plutonium production, as well as recycling tritium in U.S. weapons and making plutonium to power spacecraft.