Savannah River Site

The Savannah River Site work force faced challenges in 2005.

Officials announced in February that the site needed to trim 2,000 people. Between layoffs and voluntary departures, about that many people left the site by October.

The site got rosier news in November, when the U.S. Senate voted to spend $220 million on a mixed-oxide fuel fabrication facility that will turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

The factory will eventually rid the site of at least 34 tons of the dangerous radioactive substance as a part of a U.S.-Russian non proliferation agreement.

Such uncertainty wasn't a part of the 1950 landscape. The Cold War had begun, and the nation called on Aiken, Barnwell and Allendale counties to provide about 200,000 acres of farmland and for est.

Nearly 1,500 families were displaced in the name of freedom and protection from Soviet Communism.

The federal government put more than 38,000 people to work by September 1952, toiling around the clock toward the production of plutonium and uranium needed for hydrogen and atomic bombs.

The first reactor churned out bomb material in 1953 and kept producing it for decades. But the Cold War came to an end in the early 1990s without even one missile carrying SRS material being fired in anger.

In the late 1980s, production by the site's aging reactors slowed and eventually stopped as they were mothballed.

The business of bombs at SRS turned to the labor of cleanup during the 1990s, and the work force went from about 25,000 to about 13,000.

Today's SRS advocates say the site must diversify to utilize its wealth of brainpower and branch out into new missions.

On the bright side, Savannah River Technology Center was elevated in status in 2004 and is now a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory.

The lab has a glut of hydrogen experience, and SRS has teamed with Aiken County officials to build a 59,000-square-foot hydrogen research center. Organizers plan to lease half the space to the private sector, and at least two international car makers have expressed interest in locating there.

There are hopes that Aiken County could become a hub for hydrogen as the field expands, attracting manufacturers of various backgrounds looking to capitalize on the market.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Aiken could become to hydrogen what Detroit was to automobiles.

There also are long-term designs to construct a nuclear reactor at the site, and several universities have expressed interest in training students there.