Don't Waste South Carolina

The Savannah River Site is a likely destination for the spent fuel from nuclear power plants from across the nation if the administration's GNEP program is enacted. GNEP, Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, is a plan to reprocess the spent rods to separate the plutonium. Although there are questions about the possibility of using the plutonium for weapons, the GNEP plan involves using the plutonium to create more nuclear fuel rods to ship back to power plants.

In addition to the fuel rods, the reprocessing will also create large amounts of highly radioactive liquid wastes and will result in larger volumes of waste than the original. The plan calls for this waste from reprocessing to be shipped to a final repository, but no site for such a repository has been found. Yucca mountain in Nevada was previously the planned destination, but Nevada has refused to allow waste to be sent to the site. Regardless of the lack of a destination, the Department of Energy is pressing places who want to be considered for GNEP to agree to receive the waste even before the reprocessing facilities are constructed and before a final repository site is determined. Does anyone really believe the waste will be removed from SRS once it arrives?

The shipments that were originally destined for Yucca Mountain and which would be sent to SRS if it is selected as the GNEP site would be in the tens of thousands of truck shipments, most of them coming down I26 and I20 through Columbia metropolitan area to SRS. NIRS and John Sticpewich from  Common Sense At the Nuclear Crossroads Campaign have used DOE data and DOE software to create maps of the expected routes of waste from nuclear power plants across the Eastern half of the US to Savannah River Site.