The U.S. Is Betting Big on Nuclear Weapons—But at What Cost?
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is hitting the accelerator on nuclear weapons production at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, aiming to roll out 50 plutonium pits—a key component of nuclear warheads—by the year 2030. But here’s where it gets controversial: while new construction speeds ahead, critics argue that the race to rearm is draining money from desperately needed cleanup projects already decades behind schedule.
More than two hours upriver from Savannah, the sprawling SRS covers an area roughly the size of Augusta, Georgia. Once a bustling hub of Cold War weapons manufacturing, it’s now classified as a nuclear Superfund site. Despite decades of cleanup under federal oversight, radioactive materials still seep from nearby streams into local ecosystems. Government reports have confirmed radioactive traces in the milk of cows, the bones of wild hogs and deer, and even in fish, frogs, and alligators inhabiting nearby waterways. In one alarming discovery last July, workers stumbled upon a radioactive wasp nest at one of the site’s waste tank farms—an unsettling reminder that nature and nuclear waste don’t mix peacefully.
At present, SRS stands as the nation’s sole site still extracting and purifying tritium, a radioactive isotope that enhances the explosive power of nuclear weapons. But that’s just the beginning. The DOE’s next phase will bring the site back to full-scale weapons production—this time for plutonium pits, spherical cores that trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside warheads. Plutonium itself is a hazardous metal with a half-life of nearly 24,000 years, capable of entering the bloodstream through inhalation and causing severe lung damage and cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In October 2024, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially tasked SRS with producing 50 out of the nation’s target of 80 pits each year by 2030, leaving the rest to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “NNSA is being asked to do more than at any time since the Manhattan Project,” stated Administrator Jill Hruby. The new production schedule is tied to the W93 program, a next-generation nuclear weapon intended for U.S. Navy submarines.
And the pace is picking up fast. On September 18, the DOE announced new construction zones to accelerate the $25 billion Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), hoping to finish two years ahead of schedule. The department will also host a public meeting on October 23 before filing for its hazardous waste storage permit—a bureaucratic but crucial step in launching operations.
Yet, even DOE’s own documents acknowledge the environmental risks, admitting that the new facility will inevitably produce large amounts of radioactive and mixed waste, adding to the already aging stock of waste stored in leaking underground tanks across the site.
According to watchdog Tom Clements, founder of Savannah River Site Watch, most South Carolinians have no idea this massive nuclear revival is underway. “They don’t know they’re building the pit plant,” he said—and possibly a new data center alongside it.
Born for War
SRS was born out of Cold War urgency. In 1950, President Harry Truman’s administration tapped DuPont to build and operate the new nuclear complex to produce materials for atomic weapons—mainly tritium and plutonium. With five reactors, multiple processing plants, and a fuel facility, SRS supplied roughly one-third of the nation’s plutonium for nearly forty years. But when the Cold War sputtered to an end in the late 1980s, production stopped. DuPont’s contract expired in 1989, leaving behind a deeply contaminated 310-square-mile expanse of wetlands and pine forest riddled with coal ash and radioactive isotopes including uranium, cesium, strontium, and tritium.
Cleanup fell to the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), whose mission was to decommission weapons sites and mitigate their environmental damage. In 2000, the United States and Russia struck a deal to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium—roughly 17,000 warheads’ worth—by converting them into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for nuclear power reactors. The MOX facility at SRS broke ground in 2007, but reality never matched the promise. By 2018, the $8 billion project was scrapped amid reports of fraud, mismanagement, and extraordinary cost overruns. The contractor later paid a $10 million fine for false invoices.
Plutonium’s Endless Problem
Even after stopping production, the question remained: what do you do with all that plutonium? Because weapons-grade plutonium can’t simply be diluted into harmlessness, the DOE pivoted to what it called a “dilute and dispose” strategy—mixing powdered plutonium with inert materials to create a less weaponizable form. Russia balked at this change, backing out of its own disposal agreements.
Meanwhile, South Carolina grew impatient. In 2020, the state won a landmark $600 million settlement from the federal government and the DOE’s promise to remove all 9.5 metric tons of plutonium by 2037. Yet the waste persists. Roughly 35 million gallons of radioactive sludge remain stored in 43 aging underground tanks, many beyond their original lifespan—and some, according to the Savannah River National Laboratory, are known to leak.
A New Mission, Fewer Cleanup Dollars
Today, the same site once intended to retire nuclear materials is being retooled to make them anew. The unfinished MOX building will become the foundation for a sleek, modern plutonium pit plant—part of a national push to refresh America’s aging nuclear arsenal. But critics warn that this shift is coming at a steep price: cleanup budgets are being raided. When management of SRS transitioned from DOE’s environmental division to NNSA last year, $173 million was diverted from environmental restoration to weapons work.
Clements and other environmental groups argue that the federal government cut corners in designating SRS as a pit production site without first conducting the legally required Environmental Impact Study. Their 2021 lawsuit resulted in a settlement obliging DOE to complete this analysis by mid-2027. Until then, no nuclear materials can legally enter the new processing building. Still, the DOE’s scheduling of a public waste permit meeting this October signals to advocates like Clements that federal officials are pushing forward regardless of public hesitation.
And SRS’s expansion doesn’t stop at nuclear material. On September 30, the NNSA issued a bid request inviting data center companies to lease property at the site, adding yet another layer of secrecy and speculation to the unfolding story.
Clements sums up the situation bluntly: “There’s so much happening, and a lot of it could have serious impacts on public health and the environment. People just don’t realize how big this is.”
Now the question is yours: Should America prioritize building new nuclear weapons when its existing mess still festers beneath the soil? Share your thoughts—does deterrence justify the risk, or are we repeating history under a new name?
