SC jobseekers line up to clean nuke waste
BARNWELL, S.C. — Anthony Rivers was laid off from his maintenance job three weeks ago and is willing to do just about anything to rejoin the ranks of the employed in South Carolina — even if that means cleaning up nuclear waste.
Rivers, 32, was one of 2,000 people from some of South Carolina’s most depressed counties who flocked to a job fair this week to hear more about new jobs cleaning up dangerous waste at the former bomb-making complex, the Savannah River Site.
“They have a lot of good jobs out here,” Rivers said as he stood in line, awaiting to talk to recruiters in this rural town. “Most of them, you need some experience, and I feel I have a good chance.”
The jobs, most of them cleaning up the nuclear waste, are only temporary, funded through September 2011 as part of the federal stimulus package. The Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy site, is receiving $1.6 billion, which officials say will fund 3,000 jobs cleaning up buildings and their surrounding soil — and also make way for new projects on the property.
Located along South Carolina’s southwestern border with Georgia, the sprawling Savannah River Site complex draws employees from many nearby counties.
According to the Associated Press Economic Stress Index, an exclusive county-by-county measurement of foreclosures, bankruptcies and unemployment that shows the relative impact of the recession, counties near the site are among the hardest hit in the current economic crisis, including Allendale, one of the most crippled counties in the country.
In South Carolina, the jobless rate set a state record high in April and was the third highest in the nation.
The site was once a job jewel for the area. At its peak during the Cold War, it employed tens of thousands of people, who worked to churn out materials necessary for the nation’s nuclear weapons cache.
But when the Cold War ended, and the plant stopped producing bombs, many of those jobs dried up, leaving a huge swath of southern South Carolina with a bleak employment picture. Much of the work at the site is now is focused on cleaning up materials left behind by weapons production. Several new projects are in the works, but not nearly as many people are needed.
The new employees will be hired by the end of this summer and will focus on closing down several unused facilities, cleaning up about 600 acres of contaminated soil and disposing of or storing about waste created by processing spent nuclear fuel. Workers will also be tasked with closing several old reactors and evaporating millions of gallons of contaminated water.
Officials say the $1.6 billion project will create about 2,200 new jobs and save the jobs of about 800 people who might otherwise be laid off.
“It’s a big deal, and it ought to be,” Chuck Munns, president and CEO of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions. “It’s not lost on us that it’s our job to make it a public impact.”
SRS wants to finish cleaning up unused and contaminated areas, Munns said, so it can bring new projects to the site.
But the impact might fall short. Don Schunk, a research economist at Coastal Carolina University who tracks employment issues, says the boost will be temporary at best.
“The prospect of bringing in thousands of new jobs is certainly a good one. … You can’t pump $1.6 billion into a small area and not see some impact from that,” Schunk said “But once the money disappears, and the contracts go away … we’ll have thousands of people who worked temporarily and are going to be out of work, and they’re going to need something in the long term.”
At the job fair, Shannon Ponds said she hoped to land her first job — even if it has to do with nuclear waste.
“It’s overwhelming to me,” said Ponds, 22, who graduated from college last month with a psychology degree. “I’m just looking for anything that I can do, and I’m going to get my name on everything I can.”
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