With questions lingering about the rising cost and need for a new atomic weapons plant in South Carolina, federal officials plan to meet next week with environmentalists who sued several years ago over the plant’s potential impacts on the landscape.
Officials with the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile nuclear weapons complex near Aiken, are to host a rare tour for environmentalists of the partially built plutonium pit plant Tuesday. They also are expected to answer questions about the project’s cost, future and pollution threat to the public.
The pit project is estimated to cost taxpayers anywhere from $25 billion to $30 billion as the federal government seeks to refresh and upgrade its stockpile of plutonium pits. The pit plant, which is under construction, was at one point projected to cost about $5 billion…