AIKEN — Opponents of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility under construction at Savannah River Site said April 22 that the facility is unneeded and will be the most expensive building ever constructed in the United States.
“I’m alleging a cover up here with respect to keeping the true costs of this unneeded program from the American public,” said Jay Coghlin, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration that resulted in he and other plaintiffs being allowed to tour the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility on April 21.
The facility is being built to produce plutonium pits, which are a core component of nuclear weapons. Proponents say the pits are needed to replace those that are degrading in the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The plaintiffs alleged in an April 22 press conference in the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia that the facility is being built not to produce plutonium pits to replace those aging in the current stockpile, but for use in newly designed but untested nuclear weapons.
The plutonium pit production facility is being repurposed from the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which was intended to convert weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel. The MOX plant was canceled in 2018 after construction delays and cost overruns.
The lawsuit
In 2018, the Nuclear Weapons Council, a joint council of the Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration, approved a two-site strategy for producing plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River Site.
In 2018, the Nuclear Weapons Council, a joint council of the Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration, approved a two-site strategy for producing plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River Site.
In 2019, Congress required that a minimum of 80 pits a year be produced. The NNSA plans to produce 30 per year at Los Alamos and 50 per year at SRS.
In 2021, SRS Watch, based in Columbia, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, based in Livermore, California, filed a lawsuit asserting that NNSA was required under the National Environmental Policy Act to complete a new Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for simultaneous plutonium pit production at two sites.
In October 2024, a judge ruled that DOE and NNSA had not sufficiently evaluated the programmatic impact of producing pits at a second location and did not consider alternative locations for pit production. The judge ordered the parties to negotiate a compromise remedy.
The April 21 meeting and tour were part of the negotiated settlement agreement, which also requires production of a new Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and opportunities for public scrutiny of, and comment on, the document.
The draft of the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was released April 10.
The tour
Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch, said the tour was conducted by “gracious but reluctant” NNSA officials and representatives of the contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.
Clements said the group toured the first floor and the roof of the facility, but were told the second and third floors were off limits because of silica dust in the air from the cutting of concrete by high-pressure water jets.
“Basically, all we saw was this huge concrete shell of a building,” Coghlin said.
“I think we can attest that no classified equipment has been installed in the facility, which they’re not allowed to do,” Clements said. “But that only came [about] because we pushed for this Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, and they’re only going to be able to install classified equipment once the draft becomes the final document and they issue a Record of Decision in early 2027.”
“All there was to show yesterday on the tour was basically an empty concrete shell of thick walls and rebar,” said Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a technical advisor to the plaintiffs.
“It’s clear that the NNSA faces a daunting challenge in bringing this facility online in the near future. They have a long complex road to completion,” Spaulding said.
“Apart from the facility’s existing seismic qualifications, it’s not clear that this particular building offers any advantage over alternatives that could have, and should have, been considered by a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, had that been conducted according to the requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act,” Spaulding said.
“A Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement should come before federal actions are taken,” he said.
Clements said that during the tour, “I realized I was inside the heart of what could be a new nuclear arms race.”
Cost of the project
Coghlin said he calculates that the facility will be the most expensive building in U.S. history.
“At least $6 billion was spent in the failed Mixed Oxide program. So at least $6 billion already spent on this empty, huge concrete shell of the building, with something like $5 billion spent since then,” he said.
“The National Nuclear Security Administration now says the upper range of cost is $25 billion,” Coghlin said. “That doesn’t include the previous sunk costs… and the new budget request explicitly states they still don’t have final costs. So, we’re looking at $30 billion plus.”
“The GAO, Government Accountability Office, has repeatedly stated that the National Nuclear Security Administration has no credible cost estimates for the pit production program,” Coghlin said.
“This program is so troubled that last August the Deputy Secretary of DOE ordered a special assessment… to analyze the problems in the pit production program, and he ordered that it be completed by mid-December,” he said.
Coghlin said he’s filed a Freedom of Information Act request and that U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. John Garamendi “both have specifically demanded that DOE release that troubled special assessment, and it still has not seen daylight at this point in time.”
“We’ve got an unneeded program, incredibly expensive, that’s going to create the most expensive building in U.S. history, and the costs are being kept concealed from the American taxpayer,” he said.
“This money is not for essential work at Savannah River Site, management of high-level nuclear waste, but it’s basically to restart a nuclear arms race,” Clements said.
The justification
Spaulding said the aging of plutonium pits “does not appear to be a viable motivation for the program that’s underway at SRS or at Los Alamos.”
“You’ll often hear the program to make new pits justified by saying that we need to replace aging plutonium components in the stockpile. But, in fact, the pits in the current stockpile have an average age of about 40 years. As of today, we believe that they have life spans closer to a century,” he said.
“This is not deterrence by anybody’s definitions. The pits aren’t needed for existing weapons,” Clements said.
A new arms race?
The plaintiffs alleged in their April 22 press conference that the true purpose of the pit production program is to build new weapons.
“This is more about setting the U.S. up for production capability than it has to do with maintenance of what we have,” Spaulding said.
“This will be the first time that the United States is introducing new designs into the nuclear arsenal since the end of the Cold War,” he said.
“This is really a paradigm shift in which the nuclear complex is turning from maintaining the weapons we have using science-based techniques that don’t require nuclear testing to introducing… all new designs with potentially new capabilities and new delivery systems to go along with them. This comes along with human and environmental risk,” Spaulding said.
“Low-level waste that’s produced as a byproduct of pit production will stay onsite and be buried here in South Carolina, whereas the transuranic waste will have to be transported by road across all the Southern states, from South Carolina back to southern New Mexico to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. So, the impacts of this project are not limited to South Carolina and New Mexico,” he said.
He said the ramifications could be geopolitical.
“The new pit plant at SRS is strictly for new-design nuclear weapons that can’t be tested because of the international testing moratorium, and therefore could erode confidence in the existing stockpile, or, conversely, these new pits could… prompt the U.S. to resume testing, after which all proliferation hell would break loose,” Coghlin said.
Public input
A summary and two volumes of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement are available through DOE’s website, and public meetings are scheduled in South Carolina, Missouri, New Mexico, California and Washington, D.C.
“This analysis was done more than eight years after the decision was [made] to use this facility for plutonium pit production. So, it essentially amounts to a retroactive rubber stamping for actions that have already been taken without a true analysis of the impacts to South Carolina and to the people that carry this work out,” Spaulding said.
“This lawsuit was brought under the National Environmental Policy Act,” said Tanvi Kardile, nuclear policy program director at Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, based in Livermore, California. “It’s court-mandated, so the public does have that right to be involved through giving oral testimony and written comments as well.”
“The current administration is currently gutting the National Environmental Policy Act through an executive order that the President issued right after inauguration,” Kardile said.
“So now federal agencies essentially make up their own regulations to match this executive order, and, in response, Department of Energy created new regulations that cancel draft environmental impact statements and also cancels public engagement,” she said.
The scheduled meetings “could essentially be the last time the public is able to adequately scrutinize a nuclear weapons project, and that’s really scary that the DOE can now essentially go through with these projects without public engagement, without y’all being able to express your concerns and scrutinize these projects,” Kardile said.
The South Carolina meeting is scheduled for May 5 from 5-8 p.m. at the North Augusta Community Center, 495 Brookside Drive.
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