BARNWELL, S.C. - Just outside Savannah River Site is a hulking, 400,000-square-foot nuclear fuel recycling plant that President Carter shuttered decades ago before it ever started production.

With a 1970s price tag of about $300 million, the aging facility is a costly reminder that the United States turned its back on expanding nuclear energy in the early 1980s.

"It'll be here forever," said Danny Black, the president and CEO of the Southern Carolina Alliance, a regional development authority that is trying to find some use for the facility.

Now, however, the mothballed nuclear antique is back in the mix and could become part of the nuclear renaissance that President Bush and other proponents are pushing.

THE FEDERAL ENERGY Depart-ment in February unveiled designs for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a plan to expand nuclear power across the planet that hinges on a new and improved nuclear fuel recycling process.

The refrigerator-size computers that still sit inside the Barnwell facility and its pipes and gauges are too outdated to be modified. But its 40-foot-deep concrete pools, which were built to store 6- to 9-foot-high nuclear fuel rods under water, are in play. They're being marketed as a practice ground for SRS' F-Canyon, which for decades was used to separate plutonium and uranium from other unwanted actinides.

Site supporters have asked the Energy Department for $5 million to study the possibility of using the F-Canyon as a demonstration site.

Should SRS get the nod, Barnwell and the Aiken-Augusta area would once again be center stage in the nation's nuclear energy debate. Proponents say the modern recycling alternative and the reactors that would use such fuel would leave behind dramatically less waste than current reactors.

Naysayers point out that recycling is extremely expensive - a National Academy of Sciences' report in 1996 estimated it would cost $50 billion to $100 billion to recycle 62,000 tons of spent fuel, an estimate that some experts say is still valid.

AS PART OF the president's plan, the United States, Japan, Russia and France would recycle nuclear fuel for smaller nations, giving them access to needed energy but not the capability of using nuclear materials for the wrong reasons.

Critics say that's farfetched.

"When you're banging the drum about Iran and then you go out there and do something that makes more Irans possible, it ruins your credibility," said Jim Riccio, a nuclear policy analyst with Greenpeace International who opposes the president's idea.

President Carter used the nonproliferation argument against the Barnwell plant. The problem was that its chemical separations process left behind a pure form of plutonium that could be used in a rogue weapon, said Steven Kraft, the Nuclear Energy Institute's senior director of used fuel management.

The modern recycling process the Energy Department is promoting, called UREX , would create a fuel that included unwanted actinides in addition to plutonium, making it less attractive to would-be terrorists, Mr. Kraft said.

This new fuel wouldn't work in the nation's 103 existing reactors, or even the reactor Southern Co. wants to build at Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Ga. Fuel from the proposed recycling factories would burn faster, requiring an entirely new wave of reactors, which are decades away.

That hasn't stopped the Energy Department from asking for $250 million next year to study the pursuit.

Earlier this week, U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and directors from nine of the Energy Department's national research laboratories voiced support for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Black, the economic developer who promotes the Barnwell site, supports the idea, too. But he's reminded of the obstacles to nuclear energy every time he walks out of his office next to the dormant Barnwell recycling facility.

"Anybody puts that nuclear word into something, it scares people to death," he said.

Reach Josh Gelinas at (803) 648-1395, ext. 110, or josh.gelinas@augustachronicle.com.