Savannah River Site, South Carolina

The Savannah River Site is a 310-square-mile Department of Energy (DOE) facility located on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. It is one of the major nuclear materials processing plants in the United States, and is operated by the Westinghouse Company. The Savannah River Site (SRS) has an annual budget of around two billion dollars, and with over 20,000 workers, is the largest employer in the state. With the transforming mission of the DOE, development of nuclear waste technologies and the restoration of the contaminated land at the SRS now rivals weapons production support as the primary activity at the site. The SRS was established in 1950 (in response to the first successful Soviet nuclear test in 1949) primarily to produce tritium and plutonium 239 for nuclear weapons. The basic facility, of five reactors and two processing canyons, was completed in 1956. Four of the original five primary production reactors have now been closed down, and the one that remains operational, "K Reactor", is in cold storage in case there is a sudden need to produce more plutonium. The massive concrete "canyon" structures, used to separate the nuclear materials produced in the reactors, are still in use, processing existing stocks of radioactive material. The recycling and replenishing of tritium also continues at SRS, which is the only facility in the US designed to reprocess tritium from decommissioned weapons. The SRS is also accepting nuclear waste from off-site sources, such as other research reactors.