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Overview

In 1950 the federal government asked DuPont to build and operate a plutonium production plant near the Savannah River in South Carolina. The company had unmatched expertise in atomic energy, having designed and built the plutonium production complex at Hanford, Washington, for the Manhattan Project during World War II. The company was reluctant to undertake peacetime production for the military fearing it would detract from other businesses and link the company to weapons of mass destruction. But DuPont agreed to develop Savannah River after assurances from President Truman that it was vital to national security and that DuPont was uniquely qualified to do the job. The government agreed to pay all costs and own any patents growing out of DuPont’s work at the site. Not interested in profiting from service to the nation’s defense, DuPont charged the government a fee of one dollar for operating the Savannah River site.

Construction, which required the transfer of hundreds of DuPont workers from other jobs, began in 1950. Three years later the plant produced its first plutonium and tritium, two ingredients essential to the hydrogen bomb. In addition to its national defense work, DuPont produced radioactive cobalt for cancer treatment and food preservation and investigated the use of plutonium isotopes as instrument power sources for spacecraft at Savannah River. Workers at the site also engaged in some of the earliest studies of heavy-water-moderated reactors for electric power generation. As the Cold War drew to a close and other companies developed the necessary atomic expertise, DuPont chose to end its involvement in national defense and in 1989 the company opted not to renew its contract to manage Savannah River.

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