Notable case, Aiken, South Carolina, United States

Savannah River Site

A complex that from the 1950s made tritium and plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons with five heavy-water reactors. It left hundreds of waste units, groundwater contaminated with solvents and tens of millions of gallons of liquid radioactive waste.

At a glance

Area
80,000 ha on land1
Activity
1953–1988
Media
soil, groundwater, surface water, sediment
Kind of site
nuclear, military
National list
Listed 1989National Priorities List
  1. Area. 310 square miles (800 km²).

Contaminants

National list

On the list (final)United States

Superfund National Priorities List (NPL)

Listed
1989
Official id
SC1890008989 ↗
About this list

The list of contaminated sites that are national priorities for federal clean-up under CERCLA (Superfund, 1980), kept by EPA (40 CFR Part 300, Appendix B). Listing makes a site eligible for long-term remedial action paid by the Superfund; sites are proposed and then listed through Federal Register notices, and deleted when no further response is needed.

Includes federal facilities (Defense, Energy). Dates are the years of the Federal Register notices (final listing, deletion); 'listed' is empty for proposed sites. Some sites still on the list have had partial deletions. Contaminants and media: contaminants of concern from decision documents (RODs, ROD amendments, ESDs; EPA, fiscal years 1981-2024, SEMS document HQ/406315); for sites with no decision document (mostly proposed or recently listed) the contaminants are those EPA records for the site (FOIA-015, document HQ/406366), with no medium. 'Deleted' means EPA found no further response needed, which can include land-use controls still in force.

Status

Remediation under way

In fiscal year 2017, of 515 waste units in the environmental programme, 408 were complete and 10 in active remediation (EPA). Liquid tank waste has been vitrified since 1996 at the Defense Waste Processing Facility.

Story

The site was built in the early 1950s; its five reactors started up between December 1953 and February 1955. It also had two chemical separation plants, a heavy-water plant and a fuel and target fabrication facility. Plutonium production ended in 1988.

In 1981 trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene were found in groundwater, which started the cleanup; the M Area settling basin was remediated by 1991. The liquid waste, about 36.4 million gallons in 2005, is held in 51 carbon-steel tanks built between 1951 and 1981. Among the techniques used for solvents in soil, EPA mentions solar-powered soil vapour extraction and passive wells driven by changes in barometric pressure.

Timeline

  1. 1953First reactor starts up.
  2. 1981Chlorinated solvents found in groundwater.
  3. 1988Plutonium production ends; reactors shut down.
  4. 1989Placed on the National Priorities List.
  5. 1996Vitrification of liquid waste begins.

Remediation

  1. 1991basin closureRemediation of the M Area settling basin.
  2. 1996vitrificationVitrification of high-level liquid waste at the Defense Waste Processing Facility.
  3. —soil vapour extractionSoil vapour extraction with solar-powered systems and passive wells.

From the literature

Species that acted on one of this site's contaminants in at least one study. The list is automatic and takes no account of this site's soil, concentrations or climate.

Plants

Fungi

Nearby

Sources

  1. Savannah River Site (USDOE), Aiken, SC – Cleanup Activities, US EPA, 2026
  2. Savannah River Site, Wikipedia, 2026

Draft compiled from public sources, not yet reviewed.