Damage at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina this week from Hurricane Irma was limited to downed trees, with no reported issues at any facilities.
Wind gusts reached up to 76 mph at the site near Aiken, S.C., with sustained winds of 35 mph on Monday when Irma did most of its damage in the area. Outside the SRS gates, there were more than 20,000 power outages in the region due to the storm.
Nonessential personnel at SRS — the majority of the roughly 11,000 workers — were directed not to report to work all day Monday and until noon Tuesday. Essential personnel were tasked with minimizing the impacts of Irma by stabilizing facilities and keeping SRS water levels low enough to compensate for the impending rainfall.
“We employ our own meteorologists, infrastructure organizations, fire fighters, paramedics, and an expansive emergency response team that can activate and respond to Site needs in less than one-hour,” SRS Operations Office Manager Jack Craig said in a press release. “When hazardous conditions affect SRS, we have the knowledge and capabilities to sustain the Site from forecast to cleanup.”
After the storm hit, the site’s management and operations contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), began assessing damage. Personnel found 24 downed trees on some of the main roads at SRS, and another 16 trees on secondary roads. In addition, SRNS assisted the state Department of Transportation by removing trees on the access roads that lead up to the site gates.
SRS is home to a number of missions that fall under the scope of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Those include supplying tritium for the U.S. Department of Defense, and processing plutonium so it can no longer be used to make weapons, among others. None of these missions, or their corresponding facilities, were compromised as a result of Irma.
Prior to Irma, SRS had emphasized the safety of the roughly 35 million gallons of Cold War-era radioactive waste stored in underground tanks. The tanks sustained no damage in the storm.
“Department of Energy nuclear facilities are robust structures, systems and components with multiple layers of safety designed and built into them,” site spokesman Monte Volk wrote in a statement quoted by Business Insider. “Federal regulations require these facilities be able to withstand extreme natural events including hurricanes and floods.”
