Word: savannah
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...revelations were enough to curl the hair on the neck of the most seasoned nuclear engineer. Last April a reactor at the Federal Government's sprawling Savannah River Plant near Aiken, S.C., was shut down to upgrade safety systems -- with partially irradiated tritium still in its core. In August technicians, oblivious to the decaying radioactive material inside, tried to restart the reactor but were unable to keep it going. The next day they tried again. Ignoring procedure, they set off an abnormal jump in nuclear fission, usually a sign of imminent trouble. Workers ignored the warning, forcing plant officials...
Ever since it went on line in 1953, the Savannah River facility has operated behind a barrier of secrecy so impenetrable that officials in Washington were often in the dark. In recent months Government investigators have begun to turn up internal memos that are shattering the silence. The result: a congressional hearing that revealed a stunning list of nuclear incidents caused by a combination of primitive instrumentation, inadequately trained personnel and a management meltdown by both DOE and E.I. du Pont de Nemours, which runs the plant for the Federal Government. The impact on the environment is not yet fully...
...pivotal facility is projected to consume 19% of the $8.1 billion DOE budget for weapons production next year. Some 17,900 people work on its 192,323-acre site, even though two of Savannah River's five reactors are shut down permanently, and the others are not allowed to run at full power in part because of deficiencies in their emergency cooling systems. Still, the plant is the sole supplier of plutonium and tritium, the flint and steel of nuclear warheads. While the nation probably has all the plutonium it needs, tritium, which enhances plutonium's yield, has a half...
After operating for more than three decades beyond public scrutiny, South Carolina' s Savannah River weapons- fuel facility may be America' s most dangerous nuclear installation...
...Historian Kirk Varnedoe, at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Ga.: "I have a couple of disadvantages speaking to you today. I'm trained as an art historian, not an artist, and the painter Barnett Newman once said that art history is for artists what ornithology is for the birds...