Adair Ford Boroughs has questions about plutonium pit production

• By Colin Demarest cdemarest@aikenstandard.com
• October 26, 2020

The Democrat running to represent South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District is skeptical about plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site, a potential mission that would, if successful, amplify the Palmetto State’s role in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.

Adair Ford Boroughs expressed her reservations when asked about nuclear waste and the future of the Savannah River Site, in general, at an Oct. 22 event in Aiken. Like others currently in Congress, she pointed to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s track record.

“This is from the same agency that brought us MOX,” Boroughs said, using shorthand for the never-finished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, “and we saw what happened there.”

The MOX nuclear fuel project was axed by the NNSA in late 2018, after a legal dispute with South Carolina and in the wake of mushrooming costs, timelines and congressional disfavor.

The official termination notices came months after the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Department jointly recommended making pits – nuclear weapon cores or triggers – in both South Carolina and New Mexico. Fifty per year would be crafted at the Savannah River Site, at a refitted MOX, they advised, and 30 per year would be crafted at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Both sites, later environmental reviews confirmed, could produce the required 80 pits per year if need be. And early, sustainable success at Los Alamos, Boroughs suggested last week, might jeopardize the Savannah River Site end of the equation.

“I don’t know,” said Boroughs, a Williston native. “It’s a question.”

The NNSA has often faced criticism over large, expensive and one-of-a-kind investments. And U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and ardent defender of the MOX project, has questioned the Energy Department’s bona fides and cast doubt on a cross-country plutonium pit expansion.

“It was something that the NNSA came up with very quickly as soon as MOX was officially dead,” Boroughs argued Oct. 22. “And I have questions about whether it was as fully thought out as it should have been, or whether it’s going to look a lot like MOX.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s leader, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, also the Energy Department’s under secretary for nuclear security, has said her agency has “turned a corner” when it comes to major infrastructure projects. In an interview with the Aiken Standard last year, Gordon-Hagerty cited the construction of the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“I recognize we have a long history of programs, the fits and starts of different facilities in the past,” she said. “That’s no longer the case at NNSA.”

Aiken County and the Savannah River Site are in South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District. The area has for nearly 20 years been represented by U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, a Republican and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.