Dec. 17, 2004
By JIM DUPLESSIS, Staff Writer
The State
As many as 2,000 workers at the federal Savannah River nuclear materials plant near Aiken will lose their jobs in the next two years, the site’s manager told employees Thursday.
Bob Pedde, president of the Washington Group subsidiary that operates the plant for the U.S. Department of Energy, sent a letter to the federal agency Thursday asking for permission to lay off 1,200 workers by Sept. 30, 2005, and 600 to 800 workers by Sept. 30, 2006.
The Savannah River Site has been a pocket of high-paying jobs from blue-collar technicians to physicists in a state where pay lags the nation. About 12,000 people work at the Savannah River Site, half of them making at least $40,000 to $60,000 per year.
Washington Group has said for several years that it intends to lay off an unspecified number of workers at the site as they wind down production of highly radioactive plutonium used in nuclear weapons. The U.S. government launched nuclear weapons work there during World War II and accelerated it in the Cold War.
Word leaked earlier this month that 1,200 workers would be laid off. But some local officials thought the announcement would be delayed until after Christmas.
However, in a letter sent to employees Thursday, Pedde said he did not want to hold back information on the layoffs despite the approaching holiday season.
“I know that this is a significant, disruptive event — particularly at this time of year. It is, however, a necessary part of our responsibilities,” he said. “There is no ideal timing to raise the issue of work force restructuring.”
DOE will look at the proposal to ensure that work won’t be disrupted and will decide within weeks whether to accept the layoffs, said Bill Taylor, a DOE spokesman at the site.
James Sutherland, mayor of the nearby town of New Ellenton and an environmental engineer at SRS since 1990, said Thursday night he had not received notification of the layoff request, though he had been expecting one.
“A lot of people have been concerned about it and upset about it,” Sutherland said. “Twelve hundred people is a lot of people to put out.”
The current proposal would pay laid-off workers one week’s salary for every year of service, capping the benefit at 26 weeks. In an attempt to reduce the number of forced layoffs, the company also will allow layoff volunteers to receive the same benefit, said Will Callicott, a Washington Group spokesman.
Sutherland said he had hoped the Washington Group would offer early retirement incentives to avoid layoffs. In the past, it had paid as much as three years in salaries and added a credit of up to three years’ service to allow workers to retire early.
In past job reductions, workers have retired and stayed in the community. With large layoffs, Sutherland worries that workers and their families will leave, draining income from the area and making it difficult to sell homes.
Local officials have said they hope some of those affected will find jobs in new facilities:
• Up to 800 jobs will come in the next few years from a plant Flanders Corp. will build near Aiken to make equipment for handling nuclear waste. About half of those jobs depend on DOE’s plan to build a facility at the SRS to convert plutonium from nuclear weapons into fuel for nuclear power plants.
• Between 500 and 1,000 jobs would be created by DOE’s weapons-to-fuel plant, but the timing is uncertain. Work was scheduled to begin in May, but now many expect construction to be delayed because of a disagreement with Russia over costs for a sister plant.
Taylor, the DOE spokesman, said the department and President Bush are committed to building the DOE facility. “It has not gone away.”
DOE officials still expect jobs at SRS to decline further over the years, but are not sure how many jobs will be left.
Now, some production of nuclear weapons materials continues. In addition, about 4,000 workers process, store and monitor radioactive wastes at the site.
“We still have plenty of cleanup work to do,” Taylor said.
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