Insights from Offsite Number 2000-1 by Don Moniak Aiken, South Carolina. December 5, 2000 How do you celebrate 50 years of Plutonium and Tritium production? November 28, 2000 was the 50th anniversary of the announcement to build the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Savannah River Plant (SRP) for the production of hydrogen bomb materials, the day that 6000 people from 1500 families living in a 300-square-mile area in the central Savannah River Area (CSRA) were informed that they had to move away within 18 months--and most within 6 months. In preparation for the anniversary, a 30-person committee formed--not to plan a commemorative retrospective–but an extravagant celebration sponsored by the primary contractor--Westinghouse Savannah River Company--of the 1.5 billion dollars a year Savannah River Site (SRS) plant. Chaired by former Dupont site manager John Granaghan, the committee raised well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars for the event, including: --The Aiken Standard earned platinum status by donating more than $10,000 in addition to good press; --Five to ten thousand each (gold status) from the City of Aiken, two medical centers, the Bank of America and Regents Bank; --One to five thousand from “silver” status sponsors ranging from the local chapter of the American Nuclear Society to Wackenhut Corporation to Duke, Cogema, Stone and Webster–the consortium with a Department of Energy contract to build a new plutonium fuel factory at the site. This SRS 50th anniversary celebration was truly a lovefest, a tribute to god, country, plutonium and tritium. The paper of record in the region ,the Augusta Chronicle paid homage with a thirty- day “history series” leading up to the events (1), with full page stories written with a nostalgic pointofview and framed by congratulatory ads by subcontractors Bechtel, BNFL, BWX, and others. Rather than putting the framework into an balanced perspective, the history series instead presented Savannah River Site as the bastion of technological progress, where ecology and nuclear power merge into a happy balance. The festivities focused heavily on the relocated citizens, those forced to move from Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mills, and other small towns. Those still alive and wishing to attend were the guests at a luncheon reunion attended by hundreds of people and featuring a nostalgic slide show video. Words of dissent and bitterness were expressed by just one former resident in an eight minute story on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (2). The evening events featured a defacto rally on Augusta’s riverfront, with speeches by elected officials and Bill Richardson followed by a fireworks show, and attended by well over a 1,000 people; as well as the annual meeting of the powerful local group Citizens For Nuclear Technology Awareness with their Teller Lecturer and former Los Alamos National Lab director Harold Agnew. What was said...What was left unsaid The day featured much talk of sacrifice from the former residents. Said Congressman Lindsey Graham--a Republican possibility to replace Strom Thurmond in the senate in three years, “these people left their communities and their churches, so we could fight godless communism. They left so that 50 years later people in Eastern Europe could go to a church, people who gave up their home so that 50 years later, people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union could own their own homes, because in the communist system the government owned everything. Ladies and Gentleman, we won the cold war because of the people in this community Without exception, every speaker, from North Augusta’s mayor to Secretary Bill Richardson, stressed the important, “vital role” SRS played in, “winning the Cold War,” even though this war ended ten years ago. As with most U.S. nuclear weapons complex platitudes, the fact that building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons was a “team effort,” that SRS and others were role players in a huge nuclear weapons complex of specialized facilities, was lost from the message. The dignitaries talked about success but not challenges, SRS as an asset but never as a liability: “Today we are celebrating 50 years of incredible success at the Savannah River Site...It was absolutely one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by a federal government’s defense agency..” General John Gordon, the new director of the National Nuclear Security Agency, told the reunion crowd. Left unmentioned was the lingering presence of millions of gallons of high level liquid radioactive waste that is still decades away from the goal of being in a solid, more stable, more predictable form; or the 50-100 million curies of tritium that was “released” through air pollution stacks over the decades, much of it to fall again as harmful tritiated water in this humid region, to make its way to wells and into people’s food at every level. The challenges of putting plutonium in a safer form, of reducing tritium pollution that would be cause for alarm at most nuclear facilities, of stopping the dumping of mercury and lead laced wastewater, all these things were not even a footnote. They talked about a future in national security terms..“We are also beginning to write the next 50 years of history and those next fifty years we will be dependent upon contribution as much as the last fifty years.” Gordon told the reunion crowd, while that night Bill Richardson stated that SRS “remains a cornerstone in the firm foundation of our freedom,” Perhaps this is what the real celebration was about, the prospect of several billion dollar nuclear facilities and even the remote prospect of a 280 billion-dollar “transmutation of waste” project looming as a nuclear fantasy(3); the nuclear renaissance emerging in the Southeast with plutonium fuel making a real breakthrough in the form of “nuclear nonproliferation” and “mixed-oxide fuel.” They talked about new missions, but not missions that failed, are faltering, or are just too damn controversial just yet. The new missions-- plutonium disposition and tritium production–were on many mouths, but the possibility of plutonium pit production, a new Rocky Flats, were on none, even though it is a part of the SRS strategic plan. The faltering missions were discussed at a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) a few nights later, but that news got buried in Section B, Page 2, of the Augusta Chronicle. (4)Among the concerns consistently raised by the DNFSB are SRS’s failure to stabilize its 2.0 tons of plutonium metals, oxides, and residues in a manner that meets the long-term plutonium storage criteria; a reluctance to call highly enriched uranium in volatile solutions a waste product; and a shortage of places to store high level liquid waste–the latter resulting in an effort to pour more waste into leaking 1950's era waste tanks—as long as they don’t pour in too much it will be ok. Everybody couched their rhetoric carefully When Bill Richardson talked about accomplishments , he said “we have closed high level nuclear waste tanks, the first in this nation...we have cleaned up over 170 acres...we have established a 10,000 acre reserve to protect the site’s unique habitat and wildlife species.” But he did not say that 49 tanks remain, that there is more than 200,000 acres at the site, and that current operations continue to pollute beyond what should be expected from a bastion of excellence. For example, in 1999 wastewater was still dumped that was toxic to aquatic life in 1 of 42 samples, and chronically toxic to aquatic life in almost half the samples.(SRS Environmental Report, 1999) “They have made a lot of tritium and plutonium ...but fundamentally not a shot has been fired in anger of any of the material that has ever been produced at the Savannah River Site..” said John Granaghan to the reunion crowd. When I asked him afterward if any of the depleted uranium used on tank shells and bombs in Iraq and Serbia derived from SRS, he said he did not know, but that he knew that nothing had ever gone ever gone nuclear critical. Richardson was the only person who used the word “contamination,” this in reference to sick former nuclear weapons workers now eligible for compensation if their illness was caused by working at nuclear weapons facilities. But this was the rare exception, and one that was not highlighted as the rule of the day seemed to be: saying nothing but good or don’t’ say anything at all. Thus, an opportunity to really look at what 50 years of nuclear weapons materials production has wrought was squandered. (1) http://195.7.48.75/release/new/augusta/chronicle/srs/fedition.htm (2) http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=11/27/2000&PrgID =3 (3) A July 28, 2000 letter from Ashok C. Thadani, Director Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, Nuclear Regulatory Commission to James A. Lake, President of the American Nuclear Society, described the Advanced Transmutation of Waste project as having a $280 billion life cycle cost. Don Moniak Organizer, Aiken Office Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League P.O Box 3487 Aiken, SC 29802-3487 (803) 644-6953 Fax: (803) 644-7369 donmoniak@earthlink.net