A brief history

• 1950: Government says it will build new production plants in Aiken and Barnwell counties. It soon is learned the plants will produce components for nuclear weapons.

• 1953: The first SRS reactor is ready to produce weapons materials. Three others are ready within the next year.

• 1956: Construction of the basic plant, on a 310-square-mile site, is complete. The site’s production reactors make plutonium 239 and tritium for use in nuclear weapons.

• 1972: SRS is designated a National Environmental Research Park

• 1981: SRS begins cleaning up nuclear and hazardous waste after decades of weapons production activities.

• 1988: Final production reactors shut down. Within a year, SRS is listed as Superfund cleanup site.

• 1996: Defense Waste Processing Facility begins turning deadly, high-level nuclear waste into glass for eventual disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

• 2000: The federal government designates SRS as the site of its mixed oxide fuel plant, which will turn excess weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.

• 2002: S.C. Gov. Jim Hodges, unhappy with federal plans, sues the DOE to stop plutonium shipments from the Rocky Flats, Colo., nuclear complex to SRS. Hodges later loses the suit.

• Today: The site now employs slightly fewer than 13,000, down from about 25,000 a bit more than a decade ago. Since the late 1980s, scientists have worked to clean up hazardous and nuclear waste left by decades of weapons production. The government is now disposing of 37 million gallons of liquid high-level nuclear waste from 49 aging tanks. The site also has continued to recycle tritium for nuclear weapons to keep it from getting stale. A new tritium production facility is being built at the site.

SOURCE: SAVANNAH RIVER SITE.