Savannah River Site fell under new management in 2007 as Leo Sain stepped in as president of Washington Savannah River Co., which manages and operates the site.
The site moved forward with construction on the mixed-oxide, or MOX, plant, which will turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial power reactors. The facility will add about 800 permanent jobs to the site after construction is completed in 2014. Congressional authorization was granted in August 2007.
Innovation continued at the Center for Hydrogen Research as the model of a hydrogen car was unveiled in the fall. The 59,000-square-foot facility opened in 2006. Just outside SRS' gates, the facility allows private and government scientists to work side by side.
The facility is an example of the sort of private investment SRS boosters are trying to attract to the federal facility, which has steadily reduced its work force since the Cold War's end.
Work force reduction continued in 2007 as 311 employees opted for retirement packages. Positions were realigned to move the nuclear cleanup mission forward.
That mission began at the end of the Cold War. Before the 1990s, Aiken was the hub of production for nuclear bomb fuels.
When the Cold War began in the 1950s, the nation called on Aiken, Barnwell and Allendale counties to provide about 200,000 acres of farmland and forest. 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 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 use its wealth of brainpower and branch out into new missions.
The lab has a glut of hydrogen experience, which is being used at the Center for Hydrogen Research. 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.
There also are long-term designs to construct a nuclear reactor at the site, and several universities have expressed interest in training students there.