Statement delivered at SRS Citizen Advisory Board’s Nuclear Materials Committee meeting, August 15, 2023: Withdraw, Oppose the Ill-Informed, Misguided Draft Recommendation on “Fuel Rod Recycling” – Submitted for the Meeting Record
Due to a host of reasons, some of which are highlighted below, I recommend that the draft recommendation on reprocessing in the H-Canyon at SRS of highly radioactive commercial spent fuel be withdrawn and not taken to the full CAB as doing so would be an embarrassing and inappropriate waste of time. In any event, CAB members should oppose it. There is little factual or scientific basis for the recommendation to investigate reprocessing at the Savannah River Site and no public funds should be spent on preparation of the recommended white paper. Read more >>>
Vicki Simons
Speech to Aiken County Council by Vicki Simons, August 15, 2023:
Good evening, Chairman Bunker and members of Aiken County Council. My name is Vicki Simons. I live in Mr. Napier’s district.
Are you aware of two problems with Aiken County Council’s meeting documents? Read more >>>
Mary Camlet-Agresta
Statement made before Aiken City Council on August 14, 2023:
Good evening Mr Mayor. My name is Mary Camlin Agresta. I live on Ascot Drive in Aiken.
Aiken. It all seems to look like a quaint little city. It is growing quickly with little time in between to look at the big picture. As stated in the Aiken Standard, a 2022 traffic study was conducted by the city of Aiken’s traffic consultant. Whiskey Road is 17% over its intended capacity, and by now, one year later, I’m sure it has risen again. I have a copy of that. Could it be because many Concept plans are passed without proper assessment of the site’s location, traffic and proximity to another very familiar already established business? Read more >>>
Dr. Ronald Townsend Executive Vice President Global Lab Operations Bettell Memorial Institute 505 King Street Columbus OH 43201
Dear Dr. Townsend:
As a resident and concerned citizen of Aiken SC, I write to you to appeal to Battelle’s community awareness and conscience. Since 2022, SRNL and the City of Aiken have been in non-disclosed negotiations regarding a new facility in downtown Aiken to house some 100 SRNL personnel and operations. It is my intention, in writing to you, to alert Battelle to the firestorm that is resulting from the secret negotiations between the City and your organization.
By way of history, Aiken’s City Counsel established a development arm in 2021, the AMDC, to redevelop a major block of downtown properties. A bond fund was floated for $9.6MM to purchase seven properties, without any valuations or public announcement. “Project Pascalis” was the code name for this massive, public redevelopment project. When the citizens of Aiken discovered what had been secretly developed and promised under Pascalis, suits were filed and a petition signed by over 3,000 residents stopped the project in May of 2022. It was a classic tale of a city counsel acting without authority and public approval. The City Council was forced to disband the AMDC and now is frantically searching for a way to accomplish its development goals without public approval.
At some point in 2022, SRNL senior people conducted a series of discussions with the Aiken City Counsel to float plans for a new laboratory space in what is now Bee Lane in downtown Aiken. In secret, the City developed full-blown plans to build a 3 story, 45,000 sq. ft. facility to house SRNL operations and to provide for a meeting center on the first floor. At no time was input solicited from the public on this radical development plan and the Mayor ProTem Woltz announced the plan to the public in video taped presentation in January. A month later, SRNL’s architects held a public forum to “gain feedback and to demonstrate a potential development plan”. Of the over 100 citizens who attended that meeting, many of whom spoke, there was not a single positive reaction to the SRNL’s proposal and downtown location. Since then, not a single pubic meeting has been held and the City Counsel refuses to divulge the status of this proposed building project.
As you may know, Aiken has received over $25MM in plutonium settlement monies, and the City Council, without public guidance, is intending to fund the SRNL building with those monies. To add to this obfuscation of the project, the Aiken Corporation is being designated as the owner/landlord of the new facility; the lease would be hidden under at least two layers of non-profit organizations that finally are controlled by Aiken Corporation.
The public sentiment about the SRNL location in downtown is decidedly negative. The proposed building would destroy the very nature of our rural community and our architectural history. There is a sizeable and vocal citizens group who oppose this location for SRNL , and those negative sentiments will not go away with time. From my reading of the DOE’s stance on public relations, this ramrodding is against their public statement of community relations. This issue, if taken to full development, will not go away and will be a bitter thorn in the side of Aiken citizens for years to come.
Fortunately, a private developer is planning to purchase the 9-acre property on Richland Avenue that was once the County Hospital. Turner Development has recently shown its proposed mixed-use plan for the site, and one of its stated objectives is to build out a new space for SRNL operations. This proposal has wide and enthusiastic acceptance in Aiken. It would provide for condominium housing, office buildings and retail/restaurant amenities on site. This proposal is a perfect fit for the City and it is a logical location, given the short distance to the new advanced manufacturing facility that is being created at USC/Aiken right now.
Dr. Townsend, I do not believe that Battelle, SRNL or DOE wish to embroil themselves inwhat would be a long-term, contentious site selection. The responsibility for this sub rosasituation lies with Aiken’s current city council. Your organization can easily avoid the contentious future that lies ahead if this current proposal is approved. Rather, it would be a true “win” for everyone if the SRNL were to occupy new space under the Turner Development plan. If I may suggest: whatever you do decide to do about the location of SRNL operations, do it openly, soliciting public input often, and do your planning out in the open for Aiken citizens to see. Only then will SRNL be welcomed as good neighbors and responsible partners with our city.
Is DOE/NNSA Already Cutting Corners on Worker Protection at its New Plutonium Processing Plant?
by Don Moniak
September 6, 2023 (Updated Sept 7, 2023)
As of this past Labor Day, there are strong indications that future workers at the planned, new Savannah River Plutonium Processing Plant (SRPPF) may face unnecessary, increased risks of exposure to radiological hazards inherent in plutonium toxicity and chemical complexity.
According to an August 3, 2023 letter from the Defense National Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA), the SRPPF project leadership team does not consider vital plutonium processing safety equipment as “safety significant controls.”
According to the letter, NNSA’s project leadership team believes a reliance on worker sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch is sufficient to detect and/or prevent accidents such as plutonium fires and dispersal of plutonium oxide powder.
In the hierarchy of nuclear safety, the Department of Energy standards place “Safety Significant Controls” above administrative controls that are reliant upon the absence of human error.
The motive for SRPPF project team’s preference for administrative controls is unknown.
The New Plutonium Processing Plant.
The plutonium/MOX (Pu/MOX) fuel facility was a massive, multi-billion dollar endeavor designed to help dispose of dozens of tons of surplus nuclear weapons plutonium (Pu). This Savannah River Site (SRS) project was abandoned in the late 2010’s, following a chronic array of technical issues, mismanagement, major cost overruns, cutting of corners, and the lack of commercial Pu/MOX fuel customers.
After the project was abandoned, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) decided to repurpose the unfinished facility into a new “plutonium pit”production plant. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) was then renamed the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Plant (SRPPF). This $11 billion plus repurposed facility is already burdened by cost overruns—-the original estimate was $3.7 billion.
Plutonium pits are referred to as the primary nuclear explosives, or triggers,” (1) that dominate the known U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. Pits acquired their quaint nickname by virtue of the resemblance of the configuration of high explosives surrounding the primary nuclear explosive to stone fruit like peaches and plums—an example of early nuclear weaponeers’ inside humor.
The Pu pits are pressure vessels with nested shells of material, comprised of other non-nuclear parts, including the metal cladding, welds, a pit tube, neutron tamper(s) and initiator, as well as the usually hollow-cored plutonium hemispheres. In most pit designs, a sealed pit tube carries deuterium-tritium gas into the hollow-core to boost the nuclear explosive power of weapons.
But unlike the sweet, fruity, and and delectable flesh surrounding plum and peach pits, a Pu pit is surrounded by a high explosives package powerful enough to implode the plutonium metal sphere contained in the pit. This is not like compressing a tin can, as plutonium is the most durable of the transuranic heavy metals.
Simple rendition of one plutonium pit type, and Peach with pit on top.
The current plan is to annually produce at least eighty new plutonium pits in the SRPPF. Pit fabrication was once the exclusive task at the long-closed Rocky Flats plant in Colorado, and the work processes constitute the most dirty—in terms of waste production—and dangerous workplace in the national nuclear weapons complex. In this century, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has failed miserably to reconstitute a tiny fraction of the Rocky Flats pit production rate.
Pit production is unlikely to be the only task at the SRPPF. An estimated ten to twelve-thousand surplus plutonium pits, containing a sum of 30 to 34-metric tonnes of plutonium, could also be processed at a plutonium pit disassembly and conversion line at the SRPPF. The resulting plutonium oxide powder would then be sent to the SRS K-Area’s Pu waste production facility, where the powder is diluted to a three to five percent level within a larger mixture of inert materials.
While this is not the NNSA’s “preferred” plutonium disposition option, it is a more cost-effective choice since it would require substantially less transportation and leverage the new SRPPF for some semblance of cost-effectiveness. A second motive is that SRS is production-oriented, while LANL struggles with large-scale nuclear materials production and processing tasks. And a final reason is that Los Alamos is surrounded by communities increasingly at odds with the lab, and DOE prefers to minimize controversy in its efforts to win community hearts and minds.
Some Plutonium ProcessingHazards
Plutonium Metal Shavings, or Turnings, burning during plutonium casting phase of pit production. From Felt, 1967
There is a negligible level of debate that plutonium is toxic at the scale of micrograms, deadly at the scale of milligrams, and useable in nuclear weapons of mass destruction at the scale of kilograms. This is why plutonium work requires rigid, intensive safety systems, referred to as “defense in depth,” to protect workers and the surrounding people and landscape; as well as extreme levels of security and material accounting.
The most hazardous plutonium operations involve plutonium pit fabrication. After pit disassembly, the plutonium within pits is converted to a finely dispersed powder form (2), made up of sticky grains containing energetic alpha particles that easily damage soft lung tissues. Sticky plutonium oxide particles clinging to ductwork can also hinder ventilation systems over time.
Recycling plutonium for pit production then requires difficult and dangerous processes to remove impurities and undesirable decay products such as intensely radioactive Americium-241. (3) The resulting plutonium form is transferred to the next step, the plutonium foundry.
The foundry work involves a complex ten-step process, summarized as melting, casting, and heat treating of plutonium metal. Gallium is added at a one-percent ratio to produce an alloy that is considered almost as easy to machine as aluminum or silver. The risk from explosion, criticality, and spill hazards must be rigidly controlled; while contaminated parts such as crucibles pose unique waste management measures.
The final plutonium processing step is machining the foundry product into a precise sub-critical configuration. Like any machining, Plutonium metal work casts tiny shavings and creates fine dust.
These shavings can ignite upon exposure to air and lead to larger fires that can destroy glove boxes and ventilation systems, and cause large releases of plutonium into the atmosphere. The Rocky Flats experience suggests that fires of any size are not a remote possibility, they are a probability.
The task is to keep Pu metal fires small and nondestructive, while preventing injury and harmful exposures to workers. A small fire can render costly equipment useless. A large fire can lead to a countryside contaminated with particles that become more intensely radioactive for decades.
Extreme care must also be taken to keep plutonium metal in a non-critical configuration at all times. The wrong geometry or placement of metal pieces in the wrong configuration can produce the deadly blue light that signifies criticality accidents. In 2009, a number of Los Alamos criticality engineers walked off the job at the lab’s pit production line, citing a casual approach to criticality safety.
The final step is assembly, where the parts that make pits tick are introduced. The making of these parts pose their own toxic hazards, such as the fine dust from machining beryllium metal.
Those are just several aspects of the safety issues involved with the plutonium pit fabrication.
The True, and False, Necessity for New Pit Fabrication and Production.
Why is pit production, with its inherently high-hazard and high-consequence operations, scheduled at SRS—especially when more than 10,000 existing surplus pits may be scheduled to simultaneously pass through the disassembly and conversion process as part of long-term Pu waste production?
The necessity of new production, which has been debated since the end of Rocky Flats production in the late 1980’s, involves two primary rationales.
The first reason, and the least discussed by nuclear weaponeers and Pentagon nuclear warfare planners, is to facilitate new weapon designs. Even though there are well over 10,000 surplus pits separated from their high explosive fruit and in long-term storage, pits are considered difficult to reuse.
There are over forty-four types of pits, but each one is designed for specific warheads, and are difficult to repurpose into new warhead designs. Simply put, new nuclear warhead designs require new plutonium pit designs, and the U.S. is developing new weapons designs.
The second, and most commonly cited, rationale is that the uncertainties of plutonium aging require a “just in case” strategy. The concern is that aging impacts ranging from alpha particle damage to metal cladding to the accumulation of decay products could negatively affect the thousands of pits set aside for the existing nuclear arsenal.
Aging concerns lead in turn to “reliability” concerns. In this case, reliability is much more complicated than a “to explode or not to explode” question.
College recruits to those National Laboratories whose primary mission is nuclear weapons safety, surety, and reliability are taught that a hydrogen bomb fizzle is merely “a degraded yield relative to the design yield.” Such a “fizzle” might still constitute a yield that is still up to 10x the explosive power of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs.
Nuclear’s “F Words,” with emphasis on one definition of a nuclear explosive “fizzle.” From: Material Attractiveness and Why It Is Important, Charles Bathke, 2014 Seminar at Ohio State University.
In other words, a warhead designed for a 100-kiloton explosion that only yields a 60 to 70-kiloton explosion is considered militarily unreliable for nuclear warfare strategic planners. A one-megaton bomb that yields a 200-kiloton explosion is even more militarily unreliable, even though the latter explosion was ten times more powerful than the ~20-kiloton yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
In practical terms, this could very well be the case. A militarily unreliable high-yield nuclear explosive targeted at the Washington D.C. metro area should reliably leave a vast, sizzling, apocalyptic radioactive landscape. The same unreliability for a warhead designed to penetrate and destroy a deep underground military installation might be of greater concern to nuclear warfare planners.
But pits are just one of many reliability factor variables. Bombs can fail to meet explosive expectations due to any number of non-nuclear parts failing to function as designed. Pre-initiation that is unrelated to pit aging might result in a mere “fizzle” with catastrophic, though less than desirable, effects.
Department of Energy stock photo of glovebox operations. Gloveboxes are windowed, sealed containers equipped with two flexible gloves that allow the user to manipulate nuclear material from the outside.
The Pit Plant’s Initial Design: One Less Layer of Safety Depth?
Because of all these factors, new pit production is considered essential, and a new, smaller scale—by Cold War Standards—plutonium pit fabrication capacity is presently in the preliminary design phase at the SRPPF complex.
The highest standards of safety are expected to prevent accidents or mitigate the impacts of spills, fires, leaks, and dispersion of fine radioactive dust. A less rigid approach to safety is quite unexpected for a high hazard, hardened nuclear facility that would only be the second its kind in the weapons complex—-the last being the Rocky Flats plant built in the 1950’s.
The Defense Board is charged with oversight of DOE weapons work and related radioactive waste stabilization work, which in bureaucratic terms is called “environmental management,” and in layperson’s terms is simply called “cleanup.”
On January 24, 2022, the Defense Board issued a conceptual design review, detailing eight safety concerns. National Nuclear Security Agency Administrator Jill Hubry finally replied six months later. Ms. Hubry wrote in her two-paragraph response that the issues “merit attention as the design is matured.”
The focus of the Boards’ August 3rd letter was worker safety. The Board’s succinct and clear narrative is worth reviewing paragraph-by-paragraph. After an introductory paragraph, the Board defined a few of the primary hazards plutonium pit fabrication workers will face:
“Gloveboxes in SRPPF will stage and process kilogram quantities of highly hazardous weapons-grade plutonium. Inhalation of small quantities results in large radiological doses. Some forms of this material will be pyrophoric, meaning it can readily ignite upon exposure to air and immediately begin releasing aerosolized plutonium. In the past, pyrophoric behavior of plutonium was implicated in major fires at DOE’s Rocky Flats Plant. Other forms of weapons- grade plutonium that will be staged and processed in gloveboxes in SRPPF include plutonium oxide, which is dispersible and readily aerosolizes when spilled. Multiple scenarios can result in significant radiological exposure to the facility worker. DOE safety standards require that safety significant controls shall be selected for cases where significant radiological exposure to a facility worker may occur.”
Plutonium pit fabrication is unlike the more routine plutonium production work performed at the Savannah River Plant (SRP) for four decades. SRP, renamed SRS around 1990, was always on the front end of weapons plutonium production, not on the finishing end of weapon parts production; which was the primary reason cited in a 1998 report describing SRS as a weak candidate for plutonium foundry and machining work.
The third paragraph described a less rigid approach to worker safety by project managers:
“On May 11, 2023, project personnel briefed the Board on their position that additional safety controls are not required. Project personnel assert facility workers can use their senses to detect accidents such as a glovebox spill or fire and exit the area before receiving significant radiological exposure. Using this assumption of worker self-protection, project personnel avoided designating safety significant controls, such as gloveboxes, glovebox ventilation, continuous air monitors, and glovebox fire controls, that other DOE plutonium processing facilities have traditionally designated. The controls mentioned above are part of the existing design of SRPPF, but they are not currently classified as safety significant. As a result, they lack the increased reliability of designated safety controls needed to protect the worker.””
This paragraph is astonishing. The idea that workers have to see, smell, hear, taste, or touch a fire, leak, spill, or large puff of fine grained plutonium powder, sounds like something out of the early Cold War when military demands dictated production over safety. Workers will be asked to conduct more self-monitoring of their workplace while performing precision metallurgy tasks that Los Alamos experts describe as “kind of artisanal…It’s very exacting work.”
DOE Standard 1186-2016, Special Administrative Controls, defines “safety significant” as “a hazard control that indicates the control provides a preventive or mitigative function that is a major contributor to defense-in-depth and/or worker safety.”
According to DOE’s own standard, safety class controls are at the top of the hazard control hierarchy for systems, structures and components. followed by safety significant controls. Administrative controls are generally least preferred and often at the the bottom of the hierarchy, but exceptions do exist. (Correction and Update: Safety significant controls are higher in the safety hierarchy than administrative controls.) (4)
“Based on this hierarchy, administrative controls, including SACs, represent the least preferred means of implementing safety controls. While SACs can provide acceptable and effective controls, they should only be used if adequate engineered controls are not readily available. In general, SSCs are preferable to SACs due to the uncertainty of human performance inherent in implementation of SACs.”
At this point, the SRS plutonium processing facility planners have chosen the absence of human error in the hierarchy of safety control—for a facility that will house the most dangerous of plutonium tasks, especially in terms of worker safety.
The motive for this approach is unknown. Are project managers being rewarded for cutting short-term project costs, without optimal regard for long-term worker safety? If so, have project planners forgotten one lesson learned from the failed Pu/MOX project—that the accumulation of small cost-cutting measures contributed to that managerial boondoggle ?
Or is the NNSA seeking to push the envelope of its own modern standards, which were developed long after the closure of Rocky Flats? Is the brushing aside of Defense Board concerns a sign that the agency is nostalgically looking backwards towards the era of minimal to zero oversight and lower standards, in order to reconstitute its most difficult nuclear warhead production task?
In either case, the existing reliance upon human senses to prevent accidents suggests that DOE/NNSA might be well advised to subject pit manufacturing recruits to testing for the presence of a sixth sense.
DOE File Photo of a glossy, sanitized conceptual view of the proposed SRPPF complex in F Area at SRS. Reverse View of the abandoned Pu/MOX plant where the SRPPF complex is planned. Photo courtesy of srswatch.org
Footnotes and References:
(1) The nuclear explosive “trigger” is initiated by a power high-explosive blast that implodes a plutonium pit and the sub-critical plutonium hemisphere within. The primary blast generally involves an infusion of tritium gas, generally about four grams, that greatly boosts the power of the plutonium explosion—thus the name “hydrogen bomb.”
Together the explosion triggers a larger “secondary” explosion of highly enriched uranium found in parts called “canned subassemblies. The catastrophic impacts of a nuclear explosive using only plutonium, and prior to the introduction of tritium gas, can be found in the Nagasaki, Japan historical record following the explosion of a nuclear explosive with a 20 kiloton yield (TNT equivalent).
(2) In the surplus plutonium process, the processing ends at this point of conversion to oxice. Theplutonium oxide powder is transferred to a “dilution” line where it is mixed with inert materials to create a more stable waste form. Information regarding this process can be found in Offsite Insights 2022:1.
(3) Plutonium pit recycling at Rocky Flats involved the following steps and processes:
ü Pit disassembly with lathes or other machine shop technology
ü Aqueous processing in which nitric acid, other solvents, and water are used to dissolve the metal, followed by either solvent extraction or ion exchange to separate the plutonium. This was probably necessary only for bonded pit types (as well as metal and oxide scrap material), which might account for references to although references to dissolution of pits;#
ü Molten Salt Extraction (MSE) to remove the Americium-241 ingrowth, described by the GAO in 1992 as “mixing the metal with a combination of salts, such as sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, or calcium chloride.
This mixture is put into a crucible and heated in a furnace until the mixture of salts and metals becomes molten. While the molten mixture is being stirred, the americium reacts to the salts to form americium chloride. Then the plutonium metal, with the americium removed, settles to the bottom of the crucible. After cooling and removal from the surface, the crucible is broken to remove the contents.
The plutonium metal is then separated from the hardened salts, which now contain the americium chloride and some residual plutonium. The leftover salts and the used crucible are saved and stored so that the plutonium can be recovered” from the plutonium chloride mix.
ü Electro refining was also used to purify plutonium metal, although generally applied to scrap material and not relatively clean pit material. Electro refining uses a controlled electrical current in a salt mixture similar to Molten Salt Extraction, and involves similar equipment, and future plutonium chloride recovery .
ü Direct oxide reduction can be used to convert pure plutonium oxide powder to a metal.
(4) DOE Standard 1186-2016 states:
1.6 SELECTION AND HIERARCHY OF CONTROLS
Preventive or mitigative controls are selected using a judgment-based process that applies hierarchy of control preferences. DOE has established a control selection strategy based on a hierarchy of controls. DOE O 420.1C, Attachment 2, Chapter I, Section 3(b)(4)(d) requires that new nuclear facilities and major modifications to existing nuclear facilities be designed to “provide controls consistent with the hierarchy described in DOE-STD-1189-2008.” The second principle of DOE-STD-1189-2008 “Safety Design Guiding Principles” presents this hierarchy, which was subsequently clarified in DOE-STD-3009-2014. Following efforts to minimize hazardous materials, this control selection strategy translates into the following hierarchy of controls, listed from most preferred to least preferred.
Every year, I wait and watch for the springtime arrival of “my” Yellow-Billed Cuckoos from their South American wintering grounds. While I’ve only ever seen them on three or four occasions, the landscape would seem empty without them. Now that summer is drawing nigh, I’m still waiting to see them. Cuckoos are very reclusive birds. Many people go their whole lives without realizing we have Yellow-Billed Cuckoos in our area. While sightings may be rare, they do have a way of making their presence known.
My yard provides ideal habitat — generous tree canopy from the surrounding woods, bordered with open sky and, nearby, creeks and ponds. Come May, I’ll be sitting in my backyard soaking up the springtime sun when, all of the sudden, I’ll hear that familiar Cuckoo song emanating from the depths of some dense foliage. Song? Well, I’ll admit that description is a little generous. To me, it sounds more like a frog, or, as others have described it, a door knocker hitting a metal plate. It is a rapid, throaty “ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-kow-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp.” Not a typical bird song, I’ll admit.
Often, loud noises, such as thunder, will provoke them to burst forth in this “song,” which has led to their alternate name as Rain Crows — foretellers of rain. This year, I learned that Cuckoos actually have two songs. As the summer days laten, they may switch their song to something that sounds more like a Mourning Dove. It is rather continuous and lengthy “ooh-ooh-ooh,” or it could be described as “coo-coo-coo-coo.”
Thinking about this for a short time, I had to smack myself in the head. I realized that this is how they got their name! Coo-coo. Cuckoo! Sometimes I’m a little slow at catching on to these things. A range of their song variations can be here at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library. Below is a short clip from of a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo calling from the trees of an Arkansas farmstead.
During my online research this week, I learned that the words “kook” and “kooky” are derived from the name of this bird. How anyone can characterize Cuckoos as being crazy is beyond me. It seems that, in the olden days, people heard these birds cooing incessantly throughout the day and began labeling anyone who speaks senselessly and pointlessly as being cuckoo.
Although the subject was in debate for quite a while, it has been determined that the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus) is indeed related to the European Cuckoo (of clock fame). Also in the family is the South American Ani (of crossword puzzle fame) and the Roadrunner (of Saturday morning cartoon fame).
If you should ever be lucky enough to see one, they are very beautiful birds — long and slender, about 10 to 12 inches in length, with light brown coloration above and a clean white color below. Also, there is a large cinnamon-colored patch on each wing. Most distinctive to me is the long black tail with bold white spots on the underside. When flying, that long tail seems to flap in the breeze– just as might a flag or a banner.
Cuckoos are very shy and retiring birds. They mostly sit in the depths of some dense tree watching for movement… a cicada, a katydid, a beetle, a small lizard or frog. These are a part of their diet. What Cuckoos are best known for, however, is their voracious appetite for caterpillars. In the northern part of their range, they consume plentiful quantities of Gypsy Moth caterpillars. In our neck of the woods, they eat Tent Caterpillars (Malacocoma americanum) in the spring, and Webworms (Hyphantria cunea) in the fall. A single Cuckoo can down 100 caterpillars in one sitting.
Contrary to popular belief, the foliage-munching Tent Caterpillars and Webworms, (which are actually caterpillars), do not typically damage trees. At worst, the sight may be aesthetically displeasing for a while. But the leaves grow back, and life goes on. The populations of these caterpillars are actually kept in check by predators such as birds, spiders and wasps. In the spring, Tent Caterpillars are an important food source for many nesting birds and for the many species of migrating birds arrive to our area. The Webworms of autumn likewise provide migrating birds with the energy they need to return to their wintering grounds — a distance that, in the case of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoos, may range as far south as Argentina.
Property owners tempted to take up arms by poisoning and torching these caterpillars would do well to remember the old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. To a bird at the beginning or the end of a very long journey, the sight of a webbed nest in a tree is a thing of beauty, indeed.
September is here, and soon it will be time for the Cuckoos and the youngsters they have raised to return to their wintering grounds in South and Central America. I do so worry about them and their perilous journeys. Being night fliers, there is the constant danger of losing course due to light pollution and to collisions with buildings and communication towers (cell, TV, and others). An American Bird Conservancy study of just 17 of these towers reported the deaths of 586 Cuckoos from collision with guy wires and the towers themselves. Sadly, 4 to 5 million songbirds are killed yearly during migration in these collisions. Between the man-made hazards of migration, pesticides and habitat loss, the numbers of Yellow-Billed Cuckoos are said to be in steep decline. To be sure, I will be anxiously awaiting the return of “my” birds next year. In his poem ‘To the Cuckoo,’ William Wordsworth may have said it best.
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery.
Contributor Burt Glover became an accidental naturalist during his earliest childhood days exploring the dirt roads, backyards, polo field and barns of the Magnolia-Knox-Mead neighborhood of 1950s Aiken. Birds are his first love, and he can identify an impressive range by song alone. He asserts that he is an observer, not an expert, on the topics of his writings, which range from birds, box turtles, frogs and foraging, to wasps, weeds, weather and beyond.
The Failure of Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford and Woodford Trace Apartments, Phase II
by Don Moniak September 2, 2023
In early 2022, the $100 million plus downtown demolition and redevelopment endeavor code-named Project Pascalis was widely considered a done deal. Despite promises of “transparency” during the November 9, 2021, project announcement, not a single open, public meeting pertaining to any part of the project was held until March 1, 2022. That was the day when the demolition of both the vacant Hotel Aiken and the occupied Beckman Building on Laurens Street was approved.
The project was put on pause just under four months later, and then, three months after the pause, the project was canceled.
The reason for this cancellation? After March 1st, a movement to stop the project grew and intensified. Opponents filled public meetings, rallied with a petition with statutory teeth, posted yard signs, wrote letters to the editor, and supported perhaps the largest lawsuit ever filed against the City of Aiken—Blake et al vs The City of Aiken et al.
It was a wave of protest that swamped a confident City Council and its city-funded Aiken Municipal Development Commission (AMDC).
In the first seven months of 2023, two more waves of protest and dissent caught Aiken City Council unprepared and overmatched. Overwhelming objections to the Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford project and the latest phase of the Woodford Trace Apartments complex along Dougherty Road both failed to move forward during their first public hearings when Council members failed to make the necessary motions to approve.
The process leading to these failures energized enough Aiken residents to help swing the Mayoral primary election in favor of challenger Teddy Milner; who won a runoff against incumbent Mayor Rick Osbon by a mere fourteen votes.
Parker’s Kitchen at Whiskey and Stratford Roads.
Parker’s Kitchen is a major fuel and convenience store chain based out of Savannah, Georgia. In 2022 the company sought to establish its presence in the City of Aiken by building three new, 24-hour gas stations and convenience stores with hot food bars.
The initial two projects sailed through the City’s approval process. Both locations are typical for a large, modern gas station/convenience store—at major intersections and a good distance from residential neighborhoods.
The first project involved demolishing the blighted and long-vacant Dick Smith auto dealership at the intersection of West Richland Avenue and the bypass. The approval process experienced zero objections. If anything, the redevelopment of the former dealership property was welcomed with a community sigh of relief. Demolition has since occurred.
The second project location is on a greenfield site at the junction of East Pine Log Road and Hwy 78. It is one-third of a mile from the nearest residential neighborhoods. Again, the approval process experienced zero objections.
The third proposed Parker’s Kitchen site was to be located at the junction of Whiskey Road and Stratford Drive. But this site was close to residential neighborhoods whose only access road is Stratford Drive.
Neighbors who had gained experience fighting city hall during an unsuccessful effort to stop a LuLu’s car wash responded quickly and efficiently. The voices of protest were not “Not in My Backyard,” they were “Not in Our Neighborhood,” and “Not in Our Town.”
The objections following the first public notification of the project prompted Parker’s Kitchen representatives to hold a community meeting. The event did little to quell the growing protests.
Planning Commission Approval
Parker’s Kitchen’s proposal then proceeded as scheduled to the city’s Planning Commission. The meeting was held on January 10, 2023. Thirteen citizens rose to speak against the project during an unusually long meeting. Voices of support were absent.
Concerned citizens at the meeting presented a long list of potential drawbacks to the project. They described the probability of aggravating existing traffic problems at one of the most dangerous and poorly designed intersections in Aiken; the threats of a fuel truck fire or explosion that would block the only entranceway into and out of their neighborhoods; the specter of increased levels of benzene, toluene, and other compounds contaminating the air and stormwater runoff; and the fact that zoning conditions approved for the property in 2003 do not allow for 24-hour gas stations and convenience stores nor car washes.
Citizen opposition was sophisticated, media savvy, informative, and persistent. Several current and former Savannah River Site employees described the difference between the “Defense in Depth” safety culture in their workplace versus an apparent lack of safety concerns, beyond vehicle traffic, during the project’s planning process. Residents caught the developer contradicting their own facts within the same meeting.
The Planning Commission voted 5-2 to recommend the project move forward for City Council approval. The condition for moving forward, though, was a finished traffic study. (1)
Two commissioners, Sam Erb and Charles Matthews, voted against the proposal. Mr. Erb also serves on the Board of the Aiken Corporation and is a highly respected member of the community who operated a popular restaurant in The Alley, the West Side Bowery, for more than thirty years. His dissent should have provided an additional clue to City Council that trouble was ahead.
Their rationale for dissenting was not expressed at the meeting and not in the city’s official record. However, Mr. Erb later told the Aiken Standard that he “wouldn’t want a gas station in front of his home either. “
Developer Objects to the Delay
On March 27th, the main Parker’s Kitchen representative, Daniel Ben Yisreal, appeared before City Council to argue for expediting the scheduling of a first hearing, claiming the company’s contractual deadline for their property purchase was soon to expire.
The discussion expended nearly five minutes of the thirty-minute agenda slot for “public comment on nonagenda items.” Although public comment on nonagenda items” is limited to three minutes, Mr. Yisrael— a former Planning Director for the City of Goose Creek— was allowed five minutes.
The move was highly unorthodox since the Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford project was going through the official, legal approval process. The conversation constituted a de facto pre-public hearing that was not a part of the project’s public record.
First Hearing and a Continuation
The first official City Council hearing was delayed until April 24th. Coincidentally, a fuel tanker fire had closed traffic on I-20 East just ten days earlier—fortifying the opponent position that such an event was a probability that required consideration.
By April 24th, opposition had intensified, not abated. Following a fifteen-minute Parker’s Kitchen corporate slide show and friendly Council Q and A, the wave of dissent and protest dominated the hearing. Support for the project remained absent more than three months after the Planning Commission’s meeting.
In the end, Council appeared to be overwhelmed by the dissenting views, and stumped by the argument that the 2003 zoning ordinance for that location prohibited 24-hour gas stations and convenience stores.
When the time to vote arrived, Council took the completely unexpected step to “continue” their first hearing to a future date. This decision delayed any hope of a rapid, conclusive second hearing where stamps of approval preceded by anecdotes in support of controversial projects are the norm.
The Project Fails
This continuation of the first hearing did not occur until June 12th. It was at this hearing that, before a single citizen could speak, Council did the seemingly impossible.
After a motion to approve was made by Councilwoman Kay Brohl, the rest of Council sat in silence. No second to the motion was made, and the project died.
Following a short, stunned silence, there was a loud round of applause from a united audience. Mayor Rick Osbon then stated, at 41:30 of the meeting:
“If no motion is made, or if the motion is not seconded, the presiding officer will move on to the next agenda item.”
The same process occurred on February 27, 2023, when a mere request by a property owner for city water service also failed due to a lack of a second motion to approve. There was no lecture that day to the audience about how the process should work.
Once an ordinance fails, a developer must wait one year before reapplying for approval—unless three Council members can be convinced to reintroduce the proposal after three months.
Less than three months after the Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford Drive failed, Mayor Osbon lost his reelection bid. But he does not leave office until after the general election. There is still time for his supporting cast of Council members to bring the project forward prior to his departure.
The moment when Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford failed to move forward.
The Woodford Trace Failure
In January of 2020, Aiken City Council approved the first phase of the Woodford Trace apartment complex. The project was the second set of new apartments in the Whiskey Road and Dougherty Road area.
A contentious debate preceded that approval. Numerous residents and long-time local businesses, including Aiken Motorcycle, Dixie Lock and Safe, and Glass Works, protested the project proposal in letters and during public hearings. Documented traffic, litter, and public safety concerns associated with a recently completed and occupied adjacent complex, called Palmetto Crossing, dominated the discussion
Council still approved the project by a vote of 5-2. The most common argument in favor of the project was the perceived need for an affordable apartment complex in South Aiken.
Since the Woodford Trace, Phase I approval, construction moved forward and the entire parcel was clearcut. The before and after aerial photos are below, and suggest a forty percent open space requirement is unlikely to be met.
Phase one of the Woodford Trace Apartment complex parcel. Palmetto Crossing apartments are to the east. (Aiken County property database) Woodford Trace area, January 2023. The forested area to the south was proposed for the second phase of Woodford Trace apartments.
Woodford Trace Apartments Phase 2
Three and a half years after the first Woodford Trace development was approved, a second phase was proposed by the new owner, Wellers Ridge, LLC. (2). The project ignited a second wave of dissent and protest just a month after the Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford defeat was defeated.
When the Planning Commission held its July 11th public meeting for the proposal, four citizens spoke against the proposal, and only the developer spoke on its behalf. The PC voted 4-1 to recommend City Council take up the case. Commissioner Sam Erb was the lone dissenting vote.
A hearing was scheduled for August 14th, one week before the Mayoral runoff election. By then, substantial opposition had coalesced, assisted by a few recent veterans of the Parker’s Kitchen fight. Like Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford, the issue qualified as “Not in Our Neighborhood,” and “Not in Our Town.”
Signs protesting the proposal and encouraging people to write to Council and attend the hearing dotted Dougherty Road. The signs focused on the flooding problems affecting Dougherty Road. The exacerbation of existing traffic problems was another common concern.
Dozens of signs like this dotted Dougherty Road before the August 14, 2023 Public Hearing. Just before New Year’s Day in 2020, backed up storm drains caused the closure of Dougherty Road for two days, causing a detour and impacting local businesses.
More than thirty concerned citizens attended the meeting and almost fully occupied one side of the chambers.
During the “public comment on non-agenda items,” the history of Dougherty Road flooding was addressed by Aiken area resident Chris Johnson. He described how flooding problems were four decades old, and the foolishness of pursuing another development after forty years of failures to remedy the problem.
The second speaker to address the proposal during the “public comment on non-agenda items” was interrupted in mid-sentence, and asked by Presiding Officer Mayor Osbon to sit down and wait for the public hearing. His opportunity to speak never arose.
After the agenda item was introduced by Assistant City Manager Mary Tilton, City Attorney Gary Smith threw a wrench into the process. At issue was “Condition Seven,” which required the developer to finish an access road. Mr. Smith informed Council that a previous agreement required the city to build the road.
The Planning Commission had issued its recommendations two weeks prior that included Condition Seven. Mr. Smith, who routinely reviews all development applications and was absent from the PC’s meeting, had waited until the proposal was introduced before informing Council of the issue.
After confusion reigned as to whether an amendment to remove Condition Seven was necessary, Council then appeared to move forward. But the project proposal failed after no motion was made to approve it. The project had met the same fate as Parker’s Kitchen.
One difference this time was that Mayor Osbon did not describe the lack of a motion as “not the way this works.”
With the runoff election only a week away, debate over the controversial Woodford Trace Apartments proposal was curtailed by the inaction of City Council. A long hearing featuring project opponents was avoided, and another plan went down in defeat.
Like Parker’s Kitchen at Stratford, the project cannot return for at least another year; unless three City Council members propose to return it to a future meeting agenda after three months. But any attempt to do so is likely to strengthen the perception that the lack of a motion to approve was a means to avoid debate before the election.
It is unfortunate that it takes a large wave of almost unanimous citizen dissent and protest to open up Aiken City Council’s eyes to projects which are unpopular and ill-conceived, but that remains the current situation. It is only through strongly organized, thoughtful, and substantive opposition that the misguided projects of the future will be prevented.
The moment when the Woodford Trace Apartments project failed to move forward.
Footnote
(1) This traffic study condition stood in sharp contrast to the controversial Silver Bluff Shopping Center project adjacent to Village at Woodside. In that case, the condition for a traffic study has yet to be met one year after the Planning Commission unanimously approved that proposal.
