Offsite Insight 2023-2: What will the Chamber of Commerce say after $Billions in SRS worker claims?

by Don Moniak

January 19, 2023

The lively plutonium (Pu) disposition debates in the 1990’s, which at one point included Senator Strom Thurmond describing Texas nuclear weapons workers as “amateurs,” were very different from today’s muted discourse. The most dramatic change might be the quiet acceptance that hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons workers, uranium miners, and nuclear testing downwinders suffered harm during the Cold War, when safety was often secondary to production. A second change in South Carolina involves an erosion of public trust in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) among its strongest supporters.

In the early 1990’s, more than fifty tons of military plutonium resulting from the end of Cold War plutonium production, coupled with the dismantlement of thousands of nuclear weapons under the terms of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), was declared surplus to national security needs. An international effort to dispose of excess plutonium to prevent it from being used in future nuclear weaponry coalesced in both the U.S. and Russia in the early 1990’s. The debate over how to pursue disposition was long and contentious, and has remerged following decades of failed and stalled efforts.

While the surplus weapons plutonium was viewed as a threat by nuclear nonproliferation advocates, it was also viewed as an economic opportunity by communities in the shadows of some traditional nuclear weapons production industrial sites like the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, the Pantex Plant in Texas, and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho. In Carlsbad, New Mexico, the prospect of jobs for disposing the tremendous volumes of plutonium-contaminated Cold War waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) created a new community ally for Department of Energy (DOE) disposition schemes.

Prior to disposition, surplus plutonium needed to be stored. In the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA), SRS community boosters accepted the proposal to centralize surplus plutonium storage for up to fifty years at the site. But the local expectation in exchange for this acceptance of mere storage included operational jobs, mostly in the form of a plutonium fuel production plant that would convert the excess plutonium into commercial fuel for nuclear power plants.

This form of plutonium fuel is called Mixed Oxide fuel, or MOX, because it mixed plutonium and uranium oxides. In the 1990’s and through the early 2010’s, MOX was viewed as a “sword to plowshares” program by the Atoms For Peace lobby that began in the early 1950’s.

The Pu/MOX fuel plant was one of many promised by the Department of Energy (DOE), and SRS boosters wanted the whole package. In addition to the MOX fuel plant, which was most coveted, DOE dangled three other facilities in its plutonium storage and processing bonanza package:

• An Actinide Packaging and Stabilization Facility (APSF) to store non-pit plutonium including metals, alloys, and powders; and provide a means of stabilization if necessary.
• A Plutonium Immobilization Plant (PIP) that would dilute the plutonium with inert materials and isolate it within the massive stainless steel canisters of glassified waste at SRS’s Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). The glassified, or vitrified, waste at DWPF is the end product from the conversion of unstable, highly radioactive sludge contained in dozens of underground, million gallon waste tanks housing decades of waste generated by plutonium production.
• A Plutonium Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility (PDCF) to disassemble sealed plutonium pits, separate the classified pit parts, and convert the plutonium within to an declassified, powdered oxide form.
  
  Across the CSRA, every local government body issued resolutions in support of plutonium missions at SRS. Rallies were held and mail-in post card campaigns drew thousands of participants. Some regional opposition to these 21st century plutonium central proposals existed in distant environs such as Columbia, Savannah, and Atlanta, but local dissent was largely viewed and treated as heresy.
  
  Local Chambers of Commerce predictably joined forces to issue a unified message in support of SRS, and other groups ranging from the local NAACP to the North Augusta City Council followed their lead and endorsed identical resolutions. Within their resolutions endorsing “major plutonium missions for the Savannah River Site,” the Aiken and North Augusta Chambers of Commerce included one statement that is unlikely to be repeated today:
  
  “…the Savannah River Site has produced approximately 40 percent of all the US weapons grade plutonium over the last 45 years and has safety handle plutonium in glovebox processing equipment with no adverse impact on workers, the public, or the environment.”

Whereas comments of support from U.S. Senators Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings and Aiken County Council cited a the history of “safe” plutonium operations at SRS—without every defining “safe”—the Chamber of Commerce resolution took the further step of claiming no harm to workers, people outside the gates, or our environment.

Much has changed since 1998. CSRA communities and the State of South Carolina became increasingly wary of DOE’s plans after the cancellation of the APSF (2000), the PIP (2002), the PDCF (2007), and finally the treasured MOX plant (2018). Instead of modern buildings, SRS was left with operational facilities that are now nearly seventy years old, and an unfinished plutonium/MOX fuel plant.

DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which took over the management of the remaining nuclear weapons program at the turn of the century, salvaged much of the lost goodwill by promising to convert the unfinished plutonium/MOX plant into a new plutonium pit production facility. The plan is to make 50 new plutonium pits per year, mostly for new nuclear weapon designs, even as DOE/NNSA proposes to discard ~500 pits per year for the next twenty years.

Even with the prospect of pit production, the loss of the MOX plant was the last straw at the Capitol, and the loss of production work soured the taste of top officials for the relatively benign mission of long-term plutonium storage. As described in SRS CAB Might Stop Snubbing Barnwell and Allendale Counties, in the years of litigation and lobbying that resulted in the the state’s $600 million plutonium settlement with DOE, politicians who rarely uttered a negative word about SRS suddenly expressed trepidations about the prospects of becoming a “plutonium dump.”

In pursuit of the largest slice of the plutonium settlement pie, the Aiken Municipal Development Commission, which included Aiken Chamber of Commerce President David Jameson, sent letters to the Aiken state legislative delegation suggesting there was harm done from seventy years of special nuclear materials work at SRS:

“There is no debate that due to 70 years of SRS operations, Aiken County and the City of Aiken share the greatest impact and risk in South Carolina. Aiken County serves as the home of virtually all the 35 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste which is a result of the production of nuclear materials such as plutonium. The liquid waste is stored in large carbon steel tanks and serves as the State of South Carolina’s #1 environnmental risk and will impact our community for decades.”

This statement provides a sharp contrast in perspectives in the two decades since local Chambers and their allies claimed no harm—a false claim DOE and its SRS contractors chose not to dispute. But it pales in comparison to the second change since 1998: the steady cascade of worker illness claims following the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) in 2000. The act was passed to:

“Compensate current or former employees (or their survivors) of the Department of Energy (DOE), its predecessor agencies, and certain of its vendors, contractors and subcontractors, who were diagnosed with a radiogenic cancer, chronic beryllium disease, beryllium sensitivity, or chronic silicosis, as a result of exposure to radiation, beryllium, or silica while employed at covered facilities.”

The compensation act created new sub-bureaucracies within the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services to handle the flood of claims from former workers from across the former and current nuclear weapons complex, including SRS workers. To help navigate the bureaucracy and the complexities of radiation and toxic substance dose reconstruction, a cottage industry of health care providers emerged that promised assistance for former workers whose illnesses qualified for the program, and law firms followed suit.

The nuclear weapons workers health care companies advertise on local television stations and send out mass mailings to former employees. Some companies even set up not for profit organizations to complement their efforts, such as the now ubiquitious Cold War Patriots.

Since the passage of the compensation program, former SRS workers have been awarded nearly two billion dollars in claims involving more than 20,000 cases and 12, 385 workers:

“As of 01/08/2023, the total compensation paid under Parts B and E of the EEOICPA, including medical compensation, for workers suffering from the effects of having worked at the Savannah River Site is $1,913,612,814. “ (Stephens and Stephens law firm, citing Department of Labor statistics).

While the nuclear weapons worker compensation program created a new business opportunity in former and current nuclear weapons complex communities, the proclamation of “no harm” by the local Chambers of Commerce was known to be false at the time.

While not well publicized, SRS and other plutonium sites medically treated workers who inhaled plutonium with a chelating agent known as Diethylene Pentacetate (DTPA). According to a 1980’s DuPont medical department pamphlet, between 1965 and 1985 “more than 235 people received more than 650 doses of DTPA” at SRS, then known as Savannah River Plant (SRP).

In other words, people were harmed on the job and had to seek medical treatment. Strom Thurmond was right when he stated, “plutonium is not a material to be handled by amateurs,” but wrong to have implied Pantex weapons workers were amateurs. Two days after the uproar in Amarillo over his comments, Senator Thurmond’s office sent a letter to SRS Manager Greg Rudy that left out the “amateurs” charge:

“Plutonium is far too volatile a material to be handled by individuals or facilities that have no experience in dealing with it.”

The local Chambers of Commerce never admitted how wrong their assertion of “no harm” was. What will the Chambers say this time as SRS is back on the docket for a proposal to import another 25-35 tons of plutonium for processing into a diluted waste.

“Plutonium is Not For Amateurs.” Part I.

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*Disclosure : Don Moniak was a paid organizer, writer, and researcher from 1997 to 2003 for two non governmental organizations working on the plutonium disposition issue:
Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping, Amarillo, Texas (1997-2000); and Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (2000-2003).