A fire at a South Carolina laboratory on a site that produces materials for US nuclear weapons triggered an emergency response, but the fire was extinguished and no contamination was reported outside of the facility, site officials said.
The emergency at the Savannah River National Laboratory near Aiken, located on the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, was declared at 5:39 p.m. Wednesday, prompting a temporary shutdown of traffic at the facility’s entrances, the site’s emergency response organization said.
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Rail, river and air traffic in the area were also restricted out of precaution, a news release said. As of 9:18 p.m., there were no “operational emergencies or scheduled delays” at the facility and traffic at all entrance barriers resumed, a later update said.
The site emergency was terminated at 9:45 p.m.
All oncoming shift workers were allowed to report to work as usual, the update said.
Facility officials had directed emergency response efforts, as well as notified state and local government agencies, they said.
Earlier Wednesday, officials had advised residents to stay tuned to local news for updates on any actions they may need to take. Employees who were working in the impacted areas of the site had been sheltered “as a precaution” if they were not involved in the emergency response or shutdown operations, officials said.
The Savannah River Site contains both the national laboratory and a defense complex overseen by the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. The site is managed by a pair of private contractors: the lab by Battelle Savannah River Alliance, and the defense site by Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC. More than 13,000 contractors and federal employees work there.
The complex was built in the 1950s to produce tritium and plutonium for US nuclear weapons. Today, the site still produces tritium, and it also handles spent nuclear fuel and stores uranium and plutonium. The laboratory area of the site, where the fire occurred, focuses primarily on research, rather than large-scale nuclear material production and storage.
Savannah River Site is also at the heart of the US government’s push to reestablish mass production of US nuclear warheads. NNSA recently gave the site the green light to start full-scale construction on a major facility for producing plutonium pits — the explosive core of modern nuclear weapons — that is expected to cost roughly $23.5 billion, according to trade publication Exchange Monitor.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
