DC Bureau - Investigative Journalism, Environmental News, and National Security Stories That Matter

The majority of South Carolinians are best described as Republican and blindly patriotic. Their nature is to trust the national government on national security issues. They are the first to volunteer when we go to war. They follow the Commander in Chief – right or wrong. They believe that the safety of the country is worth sacrificing for. That selfless attitude—that trust—was abused over the decades, allowing South Carolina to become America’s garbage dump for the worst nuclear weapons waste. The state’s politicians gladly grabbed the job-producing defense money.

True, vast amounts of federal money came into the state. Terrific weapons building jobs —white and blue collar—made Aiken and its surroundings uniquely prosperous in the South. A nuclear upper middle class raised a lot of families here but the trade off in human health has been significant. The Savannah River reactor farm sits on a plain south of Aiken that has a high water table. The leaching of deadly chemicals and radiation has been going on for decades. The genie here is out of the bottle. People have already died because of this facility.

Now the Bush Administration has stepped into the picture by offering South Carolinians a Faustian bargain: Be the keeper of all the nation’s nuclear waste and we will reward you by making the Savannah River Site a true national laboratory instead of just a rusted old nuclear bomb parts factory. But the deal does not include enough money to do the best possible cleanup. Only a cursory cleanup is being offered. When it comes to high-level waste there can be no real clean up. Nothing can be engineered to hold waste that will be deadly for 100,000 years or more.

So why here?

The answer, simply, is that South Carolinians will put up with the danger here. One reason is that the state’s population has been kept in the dark about the many possible health risks associated with the facility. Federal and state officials, along with their industry partners, worked hard to keep word of the increased cancers and other illnesses out of the public mind in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. The state kept no tumor registrar during the bad old days. Veterans who worked at the plant tell me that radioactive waste and equipment was buried—even tractors and bulldozers—and no records were kept. Highly radioactive materials were even buried in cardboard boxes and no one bothered to keep a record as to where. “The goal was to save ourselves from the Soviets and to win the Cold War. We just did things in too much of [a] hurry to worry,” one plant retiree told me.

Former Governor Jim Hodges tried to stop the waste from coming back to South Carolina. He lost in court and it came pouring back in. His aides were asked to try and figure out what the trucks looked like to stop the shipments before the court decisions. They were so worried about the toxics coming back to South Carolina that there were thoughts of actually confronting the armed shipments at the border.

Hodges, a very smart politician, made an idiotic statement about lying down in the road and in this conservative state the battle he waged lost all credibility. So now the tons and tons of waste are back, and more is arriving each day.

Being a cynical reporter I tend to want to see where the money leads on stories like this. This one leads right to the Bush Administration’s pie-in-the-sky promises of cheap hydrogen technology.  Take the weapons wastes from the rest of the country and the administration will help fund a consortium of private companies (most made up of ex-defense contractors) to turn Savannah River into the center for hydrogen powered car research. But the short-term economic feasibility of such a facility is highly dubious. The administration might as well propose building the Savannah River Unicorn National Laboratory.