A fire erupted Wednesday evening in a room at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) near Jackson, S.C., about 20 miles southeast of Augusta.
Savannah River Site officials declared a state of emergency at the site just after 5 p.m. Some of the 1,400 people employed there were told to shelter in place. The Federal Aviation Administration restricted planes flying overhead, and so was travel by train, boat and car.
Officials say they found no evidence of radiological contamination onsite, or past the Savannah River Site’s borders. The emergency order was terminated over four hours later.
The 75-year-old SRNL provides a range of nuclear production and waste services for SRS, but is mostly dedicated to R&D for the nation’s backbone for tritium processing, the radioactive isotope behind bigger blasts for nuclear bombs.
The size and cause of the fire are not yet confirmed, nor what materials sparked the event. But reports indicate a history of fire suppression weaknesses.
In an inspection conducted earlier this year by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), the independent government agency flagged a letter it wrote in 2023 on concerns regarding SRNL’s fire suppression system. The Department of Energy conducted an analysis, but the report states most open items were still not addressed three years later.
The DNFSB’s ability to oversee the safety of DOE nuclear facilities has been notably handicapped in recent years. Although the board is intended to consist of five members, former SRNL Portfolio Manager Deborah Lee has been serving as the last remaining board member since last year.
In its letter to Congress this summer, the DNSFB called recent hurdles to accessing DOE sites as the most significant in its history, since Congress mandated its formation in 1988. The agency cited verbal and written denials to its requests from DOE. Sometimes, there was a lack of response altogether.
“Because of these access challenges, the Board has been unable to conduct some safety reviews,” the letter stated. “The Board is concerned that this significant level of access denial and limitation is occurring simultaneously with a considerable increase in production at defense nuclear facilities and regulatory change.”
The SRNL and DOE have yet to respond to request for comment to these claims, other than the fact that an investigation of the fire is underway.
Now, the SRNL is preparing to support the Savannah River Site’s new mission of making the silvery metal responsible for the explosion itself, plutonium. And plutonium does pose an added fire hazard.
In June, the DNSFB reported a glovebox fire at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility in New Mexico. Fires in Rocky Flats, Colo., in the 1950s and 1960s led to widespread plutonium and uranium contamination reaching the Denver area.
For decades, the DOE’s Department of Environmental Management has overseen the SRNL to clean up remaining waste onsite from past nuclear activities at the Savannah River Site. In recent months, DOE Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Tim Walsh has been vocal that will soon be renamed to the Office of Nuclear Restoration and Revitalization.
This story comes to The Current GA through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.