Photo: Plutonium puck produced in “defense” reactors at the DOE’s Savannah River Site. SRS produced about 36 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium in 5 reactors, which were all closed by 1990. Processing of irradiated reactor materials to remove plutonium tens of yielded millions of gallons of deadly nigh-level nuclear waste that still plagues the site and poses a threat to the environment and public health in South Carolina and Georgia.

“Rare Referendum on Nuclear Warheads Begins in South Carolina”

by Taylor Barnes, Inkstick Media, May 19, 2026

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In a beige-brick community center behind tennis and basketball courts hosting lively matches, nearly 100 people gathered in the South Carolina town of North Augusta earlier this month for the sort of event that’s rarely occurred in the eight decades since the United States acquired nuclear weapons. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), its hand forced by a successful lawsuit filed by a coalition of scrappy watchdog groups, was holding the first of five court-ordered public hearings. The purpose was to ask locals whether new nuclear warhead production in and around their towns made them feel safe in their daily lives.

The lawsuit had introduced a rare speedbump into the United States’ new nuclear arms race, which was playing out nearby in a 310 square-mile plant called the Savannah River Site (SRS), whose existence dates back to the early days of the Cold War. When that conflict wound down, the site’s reactors were shut down and its mission largely transitioned to cleanup. The tens of millions of gallons of radioactive waste held in aging and cracking tanks that SRS staff call “tank farms” led the weapons plant to be declared a Superfund site. The state of South Carolina has called the tank farms “single largest environmental threat in South Carolina.”

But while the SRS inched ahead in its task to clean up the Cold War-era waste, the government proposed a plowshares-into-swords reversal for the site. The DOE decided that a mothballed nuclear energy facility there would be torn apart and repurposed as a warhead plant to make hundreds of plutonium pits, the hollow cores of nuclear weapons, over the next half century.

The prompt for the hearing in North Augusta was the government’s drafting of a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), hundreds of pages that outlined their expectations for how pit production would contribute to air pollution, hazardous waste production, groundwater contamination, and other problems in surrounding communities. And for a topic often veiled by jargon and secrecy, the discussion at the event was frequently blunt.

>>>full article: https://inkstickmedia.com/rare-referendum-on-nuclear-warheads-begins-in-south-carolina/

Photo on front page: citizens gather in Columbia, SC at the state capitol on April 22, 2026, to protest plans for the SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant, to make plutonium pits at the Savannah River Site, for new nuclear warheads – as part of an effort to fuel a new nuclear arms race

“Rare Referendum on Nuclear Warheads Begins in South Carolina”

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