The Savannah River Site (SRS), formerly the Savannah River Plant, is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) industrial complex located in South Carolina, United States, on land in Aiken, Allendale and Barnwell counties adjacent to the Savannah River. It lies southeast of Augusta, Georgia. The site was built during the 1950s to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons. It covers and employs more than 10,000 people.
The SRS is owned by the DOE. The management and operating contract is held by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions LLC (SRNS) and the Integrated Mission Completion contract by Savannah River Mission Completion (SRMC). A major focus is cleanup activities related to work done in the past for American nuclear buildup. Currently none of the reactors on-site are operating, although two of the reactor buildings are being used to consolidate and store nuclear materials.
SRS is also home to the Savannah River National Laboratory and the United States' only operating radiochemical separations facility. Its tritium facilities are the United States' sole source of tritium, an important ingredient in nuclear weapons. The United States' only mixed oxide (MOX) manufacturing plant was being built at SRS. It was intended to convert legacy weapons-grade plutonium into fuel suitable for commercial nuclear power plants, but construction was terminated in February 2019.
Savannah River Plant
The Savannah River Plant (SRP) facilities were built in the 1950s on the Savannah River in Aiken and Barnwell counties South Carolina, about southeast of Augusta, Georgia. Their function was to produce materials used in the fabrication of nuclear weapons, primarily tritium and plutonium, by irradiating target materials with neutrons in nuclear reactors. Five heavy-water reactors were built on the site. Other facilities at the plant included two chemical separation plants, a heavy water extraction plant, a nuclear fuel and target fabrication facility and waste management facilities.
The contract to build and operate the plant was given to DuPont. The contract, which was signed on 30 September 1953, was a cost-plus-fixed-fee one, with the fee set at one dollar. Construction of the first reactor at the Savannah River Plant, R Reactor, was begun in June 1951, and was completed in July 1953, twenty-five months later. R Reactor became operational in December 1953. P, L, and K Reactors followed in February, July and October 1954, respectively, and the fifth reactor, C Reactor, went critical in February 1955. The first irradiated fuel was discharged, from R Reactor, in March 1955.
As the operators became more familiar with the reactors, they found that the power levels could be increased. C Reactor was built with twelve heat exchangers, but the others had only six due to limited supplies of heavy water and a shortage of heat exchangers. In 1956, the number of heat exchangers was increased to twelve on all five reactors, and the power output was increased from 378 MW to 2,250 MW. This in turn meant that the cooling water, which was discharged back into the Savannah River, was hotter. A cooling pond, known as the P and R (or Par) Pond, was constructed in 1958 to allow water to cool before being discharged. P and R Reactors also drew on Par Pond for cooling water, thereby saving pumping costs and making more river water available to the other reactors.
Production of plutonium for defense programs ceased in 1988, and by the end of the year all five reactors had been shut down.
Management By the late 1980s, the terms of the original contract with DuPont no longer satisfied Congress. In particular, there was disatisfaction with the part of the contract that held that DuPont was not liable for damages in the event of an accident or litigation. DuPont felt that this was only fair, as the firm was operating the plant on a non-profit basis, and had accepted the contract only out of a sense of corporate patriotism, but Congress pressed for the contract to be revised. In 1987, DuPont notified the United States Department of Energy (DOE) that it would not continue to operate and manage the site when the latest extension expired in 1989.
The DOE put the contract out to tender. The Savannah River Plant would be operated for a profit of between $26 and $40 million (equivalent to between $ and $ million in ). The Price-Anderson Act provided liability protection for the operator. There were two bids: one from Westinghouse Electric with Bechtel, and one from a consortium headed by Martin Marietta with EG&G and United Engineers and Constructors. On 8 September 1988, DOE announced that the contract had been awarded to the Westinghouse Savannah River Company, a subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric created to run the SRP. Westinghouse assumed control of the SRP on 1 April 1989, and one of its first actions was to rename the facility the Savannah River Site (SRS), reflecting the fact that there were several plants on the site and the primary focus had shifted from production of nuclear weapons to other missions. Existing employees were guaranteed continued employment, and the work force grew to 22,800 and the budget to $2.2 billion in 1991 (equivalent to $ billion in ), twice what it had been in 1989.
On the one hand, there was public pressure not to restart the reactors; on the other, there was a pressing need for tritium. A Westinghouse safety review in April 1989 found that K, L and P reactors could all be restarted, but attention was focused on K Reactor. In May 1990, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins announced that K Reactor would be restarted in December, followed by P Reactor in March 1991 and L Reactor in September 1991. South Carolina law now required that water discharged into the river be no warmer than . To meet this requirement, a cooling tower was built at a cost of $90 million (equivalent to $ million in ).
In December 1991, one of K Reactor's heat exchangers sprung a leak and of tritiated water was released into the river. Public utilities downstream closed their inputs until the contaminated water had passed. K Reactor went critical on 8 June 1992, but only for a test run. P Reactor was shut down permanently in February 1991. L Reactor, which was on standby, was ordered to be shut down permanently without the possibility of restart in April 1993, and in November 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary announced that K Reactor would not be restarted.
In 1995, DOE announced that it would seek an open selection process for the SRS contract, which was up for renewal. However, the only bid received was from the Westinghouse Savannah River Company. In addition to its partner Bechtel, Westinghouse now also brought in Babcock & Wilcox and British Nuclear Fuels. In a visit in 2004, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham designated the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), one of twelve DOE national laboratories. In 1997, the United States and Russia entered into an agreement aimed at halting the production of weapon-grade plutonium. Under the terms of the agreement, Russia's three active plutonium-producing reactors were to be converted to eliminate their capacity to produce weapons-grade plutonium by 2000. The agreement also prohibited the United States and Russia from restarting plutonium producing reactors that had already been shut down.
The contract was to be re-bid in 2006, but the DOE extended it for 18 months to June 2008. DOE decided to issue two new contracts: one for management and operations (M&O) and one for liquid waste. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) – a Fluor partnership with Honeywell – and Huntington Ingalls Industries (formerly part of Northrop Grumman) – submitted a proposal in June 2007 for the new M&O Contract. On 9 January 2008, it was announced that SRNS had won the M&O contract, with a 90-day transition period commencing on 24 January 2008. Savannah River Remediation (SRR) was awarded the contract for the Liquid Waste Operations.
In 2012, the M&O contract was extended by 38 months to 2016. In 2021, DOE awarded the new Integrated Mission Completion Contract to Savannah River Mission Completion, an LLC comprising BWX Technologies, Amentum's AECOM, and Fluor. Transition from the Liquid Waste Operations contract to the Integrated Mission Completion Contract was completed in early 2022. In 2025, 13,510 people were employed on the site. As of 2020, the economic impact of SRS was estimated to be $2.2 billion per year (equivalent to $ billion in ) in the surrounding region.
Environmental remediation Decades of nuclear material production for defense purposes, along with the site's historical waste disposal practices, have led to significant environmental contamination, the accumulation of large quantities of nuclear waste and surplus nuclear materials requiring disposal, and the need to safely decommission numerous disused facilities. Disposal techniques, such as the use of seepage basins for liquid waste and underground tanks for high-level radioactive materials, directly contaminated soil, groundwater, and surface water. This contamination posed substantial risks to the health and safety of surrounding communities and local ecosystems. Soil contamination was particularly widespread, with over in D Area affected by coal ash disposal, the burial of soil contaminated following the 1966 Palomares incident in Spain, and the presence of radioactive iodine-129 near fuel processing facilities. Furthermore, the site's location adjacent to the Savannah River, a major regional water source, presented a clear pathway for contaminants to migrate downstream, potentially impacting water quality for numerous communities and ecosystems. Consequently, recognizing these risks, the decommissioning of nuclear facilities and the environmental remediation of contaminated areas became imperative by the end of the 1980s.
In 1981, environmental monitoring disclosed the presence of trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene in groundwater near the M Area settling basin. These were non-radioactive solvents normally used by the dry cleaning industry but employed at the SRP as a degreaser. The basin had overflowed and contaminated the surrounding area, including Lost Lake, a wetland in a shallow depression. The organic chemicals were removed from the groundwater by pumping and treating the water. Heavy sludge and contaminated soil was dumped in the M Area settling basin, which was then capped with dense clay and covered with soil and grass. The process was completed in 1991 at a cost of $5.8 million (equivalent to $ million in ) from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
In the process, Lost Lake was drained, the vegetation and that of around was pulled up and burned, and the contaminated soil was replaced with soil cleaned with one of four treatments. About 150 plants of ten different species were planted around Lost Lake, which was allowed to refill, and aquatic vegetation was planted. Between 1993 and 1996, scientists from Westinghouse, the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Savannah River Forest Station of the United States Forest Service observed the amphibians gradually recolonizing Lost Lake; eventually 15 of the 16 species originally present returned.