Photo by SRS Watch, December 5, 2019: The looming hulk of the long-shuttered Allied-General Nuclear Services (AGNS) reprocessing plant near Barnwell, South Carolina (and adjacent to the DOE’s Savannah River Site).
The facility is an enduring tribute to the failed experiment with reprocessing of highly radioactive commercial spent fuel, to remove and stockpile weapon usable plutonium.
Thankfully the reprocessing effort failed and the project was halted in the late 1970s. If reprocessing had gone forward, there would be a large amount of hard-to-manage high-level waste at the Barnwell facility and a stockpile of unusable weapon-usable plutonium. Due to sound nuclear non-proliferation policies, the US is not saddled with a problematic stockpile of “commercial” plutonium, as we see in the United Kingdom, Russia, France and Japan.
The DOE’s failed plutonium fuel (MOX) project in 2018 underscores both no interest in use of plutonium as a commercial reactor fuel and the untenable cost of efforts to fabricate MOX. The aftermath of the MOX debacle continues and the cover-up of the project warrants investigations into fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement.
The old reprocessing plant is now called the Government Training Institute (GTI) and is used for police training. It is unknown how often the facility is used or how much the GTI costs. A nuclear laundry, once located in a Columbia, SC neighborhood (which was contaminated by its shoddy operation) is also located on the site.
Historic GAO report from 1982: “An Evaluation of Federal Support of the Barnwell Reprocessing Plant and the Department of Energy’s Spent Fuel Storage Policy”