It's been a long time coming, but prospects for the Savannah River Site are finally looking brighter.

First, there was the $4 billion mixed-oxide fuel plant to be located there. That's the Department of Energy's MOX project that's just getting under way. It will convert 34 metric tons of plutonium, being taken out of weapons, into fuel for commercial reactors.

Now comes the DOE's announcement that it plans to build another $300 million to $500 million facility at the nuclear weapons plant near Aiken to get rid of 13 metric tons of orphaned plutonium that's too dirty to run through MOX. In a process known as "vitrification," the new factory will mix plutonium with glass and place it in steel canisters to be shipped out of the state for burial, presumably to Yucca Mountain, Nev.

Construction of the vitrification facility will begin near the end of 2008, and will require about 300 workers to build it and 500 to operate it, DOE nuclear materials director Allen Gunter told the SRS Citizens Advisory Board.

But this is only part of the good news. The significance of cleaning up the dirty plutonium is that, as the plan moves ahead, it should put an end to a rare feud between the DOE and the governments of South Carolina and Aiken County.

The state has been concerned for years that plutonium being shipped to SRS for processing would never leave there, even though the site wasn't fit for permanent plutonium storage. Former Gov. Jim Hodges tried to stop plutonium shipments in 2002 with a lawsuit. And earlier this year, the Aiken County Council filed a lawsuit demanding that Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman make good on the agency's vow to develop a plan to remove not just the MOX fuel, but all unusable plutonium.

Between both plans - MOX and vitrification - state and local worries about permanent plutonium storage at SRS should fade away. Indeed, says Mal McKibben of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, if the county council doesn't withdraw its suit, the judge probably will toss it. The suit calls for a plan to dispose of all of SRS' unwanted plutonium, and now it's got one, complete with funding and a schedule.

The resolution of this problem should give a major boost to the CSRA campaign to persuade the government to locate the Consolidated Plutonium Center at SRS. That facility, consolidating the nation's nuclear weapons upgrades, would cost up to $300 million a year to run and employ about 1,000 people. Although construction won't begin until 2013, the site for the center is slated to be announced by the fall of 2008.

Needless to say, SRS' decades of experience in handling plutonium makes it a prime candidate for this hugely important new mission. "We should be the plutonium site for the country," says McKibben.

This is the latest encouraging sign that the government has plans for SRS beyond just cleaning it up and shutting it down.