Plutonium Settlement Funds are Not Earmarked for Project Pascalis
By Don Moniak
Summary: Twenty five million dollars from State of South Carolina Plutonium Settlement funds legislatively allocated to the City of Aiken do not include any reference to Project Pascalis, and are not project specific. Citizens of the City of Aiken have the opportunity to participate in future deliberations regarding final allocation of these funds for redevelopment and investments in “downtown and Northside Aiken.”
The $600 Million Settlement
On August 31, 2020, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced the largest settlement ever with the federal government. After four years of litigation pertaining to the storage of approximately 9.5 metric tons of surplus military plutonium transferred to the Savannah River Site (SRS) since 2002, a $600 million dollar settlement with the U.S. Department of Energy was reached.(1)
The settlement was enabled by a minor amendment sponsored by then Representative Lindsey Graham to the 2003 Defense Authorization Act. The amendment mandated the federal government to remove at least one ton of plutonium per year from the Savannah River Site beginning in 2016, or pay fines of up to $160 million per year to the state of South Carolina.
Neither the amendment nor the settlement addressed the approximately two tons of military plutonium left in storage at SRS after more than three decades of plutonium production work officially ceased in 1990.
The funds are described as “economic and assistance payments,” but the settlement does not specify any detailed criteria for spending the money. Of the $600 million dollars, lawyers for the state were awarded $75 million by the Attorney General’s office (a controversial decision currently being litigated), leaving $525 million for the South Carolina General Assembly to distribute. In June 2022 the South Carolina General Assembly finalized the distribution of funds within its fiscal year 2023 budget.
The only line item that pertains to redevelopment in the City of Aiken is $25 million for “downtown and Northside redevelopment,” and Project Pascalis is not specifically identified. This is true in each version of both Senate and House bills during the recent legislative session. The distribution of the funds is now at the discretion of Aiken City Council. The city’s budget is a matter of public record and its approval involves two public hearings, so citizens will have a say in how the money is spent.
City officials have implied that $20 million of this money is dedicated to Project Pascalis. For example, the Aiken Municipal Development Commission’s (AMDC) May 2022 paper “Just the Facts: Why Pascalis, how do we pay for it?” In it, the AMDC wrote:
$525 Million Plutonium Settlement provides once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in concrete project that creates generational prosperity for the City of Aiken. (2)
The opening statement is misleading, since the next sentence describes a request for:
$20 million in Plutonium funds to directly support Pascalis. That request is being considered by the General Assembly and passage could come as early as June of 2022.
The AMDC Lobbying Efforts: No Requests for Pascalis
Not only are plutonium settlement funds not specifically dedicated to Project Pascalis in the state budget, there is no evidence the city specified the project in its lobbying efforts to state legislators.
The Aiken Municipal Development Commission began discussing the settlement funds almost immediately, and the money stayed on the agenda for months. (3)
Two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the City of Aiken regarding letters pertaining to plutonium settlement fund requests from the city have yielded no documents specifying Project Pascalis as a desired beneficiary of the funds. (4)
The first letter to county and state officials was mailed only seventeen days later. The September 17th lobbying letter established a theme asserting ownership of the funds by the three counties adjoining SRS while blaming the federal government for violating the public trust:
The settlement is a result of the failure of the U.S. government to fulfill its obligations to our communities in return for a good faith effort to accept plutonium from across the country.
This statement and others like it were to be repeated until it became accepted as fact, it was not true. Part three of this series will discuss the stand-alone decision in 1997 to store surplus military plutonium at SRS for up to fifty years, and the debate leading up to the settlement.
The September 17th letter did not identify any funding needs, and in fact stated that “allocation of funds should be objective, not project specific.”
More specific requests from the AMDC were sent on December 16, 2020 to Aiken Mayor Rick Osbon. Of $95.4 million in requests for various projects, $15 million was requested for downtown and Northside redevelopment and investment. AMDC Chair Keith Wood wrote:
The AMDC, and others should work to fund and coordinate the acquisition and assembly of land and/ or derelict properties at sufficient scale to be repackaged as available sites for medium-density housing/ mixed-use, mixed-income residential and marketed to the development community for either private sector projects or public-private partnerships where appropriate. These funds would also be available to provide incentives for projects that face a funding delta based on the increased cost of property in the central business district through public participation in the projects to include parking solutions, public utility infrastructure, green space uses such a trails, squares and pocket parks, etc. that can reduce the overall project costs while providing a public benefit. Areas of interest include downtown Aiken ( Hotel Aiken project),Aiken’s Northside (former Say-A-Lot site for grocery), East Aiken (East Richland Avenue) and strengthen connection along Route 1 to 1- 20. Identify potential sites along Route 1 for development. 15 million.
The phrase “Project Pascalis” was never mentioned because the project did not yet exist. The request only identified “areas of interest.”
Two days later, Mayor Osbon sent a letter to Aiken County Council Chairman Gary Bunker outlining the City of Aiken’s priority wishlist for plutonium funds disbursement. Whereas Osbon expanded the overall list and increased the desired amount to $223 million (6), the request for redevelopment and investment in downtown and the Northside remained at $15 million. Osbon forwarded the exact language of the AMDC for that request.
No other request letters from the Mayor, City Council, or the AMDC have been identified. As will be discussed in Part 4 of this series, the line item that could involve Project Pascalis has always been more generalist and not project specific. If Project Pascalis is cancelled, that money still remains available for “downtown and northside redevelopment.”
For information on how the Chamber of Commerce and Nuclear Contractor Executives publicly acknowledged plutonium dangers, see Offsite Insights 2022-2 and Plutonium is not for Amateurs, Part II.
The two articles also form an introduction to “From Plutonium Economy to Plutonium Dump: A History of the Plutonium Settlement,” which is in progress.
In progress: The Plutonium Settlement disbursement debate and final results.
For Reference
(1) The announcement of the settlement is at:
The seven page settlement is at:
(2) https://aikenmdc.org/2022/05/16/just-the-facts-why-pascalis-how-do-we-pay-for-it/
(3) Meeting minutes from AMDC public meetings held from September 2020 to _____, 2021 describe discussions on the matter. (add more here)
(4) A June 10, 2022 FOIA request asked for
“All official correspondence between the AMDC and or City of Aiken regarding the plutonium settlement funds. Specifically, and at a mininum, I am requesting the letter from the AMDC “sent to the Governor, the delegation, and other elected officials” referenced in October and November, 2020 AMDC meeting minutes.”
Twenty one documents were retrieved, of which twenty were duplicates of the September 17, 2020 letter. The city charged $24 for this request, and claimed 1.75 hours of retrieval time was required to locate three letters involving requests for $95 to $223 million dollars from the State of South Carolina. A subsequent appeal to the city manager yielded a fee wavier
An additional request on June 23 specifically asked for “documentation supporting the following assertions: a. City has requested $20 million in Plutonium funds to directly support Pascalis. That request is being considered by the General Assembly and passage could come as early as June of 2022.”
This request yielded the same three letters as the previous request, with no new lobbying letters since December 2020. The cost this time was $16 for 1.25 hours of search time, for documentation forming the basis of a one month old AMDC published “fact sheet.”
(5) ) The remaining $80 million in requests involved $30.4 million for Whiskey Road Corridor, and $50 million for “four strategic and and interrelated steps to ignite an innovation ecosystem in Aiken” in the USC-Aiken vicinity. This included additional funding for two projects already in the planning process, one new vaguely defined initiative, and roadwork:
$10 million for the “Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative (AMC).
$15 million for the South Carolina National Guard Cyber Security Dreamport;
$20 million for a new Aiken Innovation and Impact District to work with the AMC and Dreamport
$5 million for widening of University Parkway
(6) Mayor Osbon’s exorbitant request for $223 million of the available $525 million included the “innovation ecosystem” and downtown and northside development requests, but added $124 million for additional portions of the Whiskey Road project.
