Using enough material to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools, crews at Savannah River have permanently sealed off an underground basin at the site's C Reactor.
On Monday, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions announced it had finished filling the interconnected chambers of the facility's disassembly basin with 2.8 million gallons of grout. The material will contain the radiation left behind from decades of cutting and storing reactor fuel elements irradiated during Cold War plutonium production. Operating from 1955 to 1985, the reactor was one of five of its kind at the site, two of which were decommissioned earlier in a similar fashion.
“Over two million gallons of water had to be evaporated using special equipment to create the space for the grout,” manager Chris Bergren said in the release. “Due to C Reactor’s historical status, the rest of the building will not be filled with grout. Our goal is to safely eliminate a potential source of contamination while fully preserving the historical integrity of the building as a whole.”
The site in South Carolina near Augusta, Ga., hosted a range of reactors and production facilities supporting nuclear weapons production. It is currently owned by the Department of Energy, and cleanup of the reactors has been contracted to Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, a consortium that includes Fluor, Newport News Nuclear and Honeywell.