The K Reactor at the Savannah River Site (SRS) sits on the eastern bank of the Savannah River, facing west over six miles of woods and swampland, which remain uninhabitable for humans. The reactor is now a tomb for thirteen tons of plutonium, the highly radioactive fuel—and deadliest substance known to us—that powers hydrogen bombs. The plutonium lies inside, encased in steel canisters behind seven-foot-thick concrete walls. The four other reactors on site have been cast in concrete from a void in their own images from the inside out, calling to mind the poetry in Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 public sculpture, House, a hulking, brutal mass cast from the interior of a Victorian home. The final step in the decommissioning process was to fill these nuclear reactors entirely with cement, transfixing them into impenetrable blocks.
SRS, owned by the US Department of Energy (DOE), spans over three hundred square miles and is considered to be one of the most toxic sites on Earth. Construction on the site, originally named the Savannah River Plant, began in 1950 when the Atomic Energy Commission (now DOE) seized about two hundred thousand acres in South Carolina. The facility is just southeast of Augusta, Georgia, near Aiken, South Carolina. Fifteen hundred families were given just over a year to leave their homes and farms behind, the promise of fair compensation left unfulfilled. Towns like Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mill, and Leigh were razed. SRS would go on to produce roughly 40 percent of the plutonium used in the world’s Cold War weapons. The steel canisters produced to hold the waste are projected to last fifty years. The half-life for Plutonium-239, the isotope of plutonium produced at SRS, is 24,100 years.
For House, Whiteread made a complete concrete casting of the insides of a late-nineteenth-century house in East London, after which she removed the exterior: windows, walls, and doors. The house was typical of the neighborhood, an East End family home later dubbed an eyesore, but its inverted details made the familiar shapes uncanny. Window panes jut out at unfamiliar depths and moldings make incisions cutting through the concrete. It commemorated no event and no singular person. Rather, the work is about spaces lived within, maybe as a survival of the Blitz or an embodiment of some stubborn hanging on. Slated for demolition in the early 1990s like the rest of the homes on its block, House is a structure’s last gulp for air before becoming a memory itself. Alone on the block against grey skies, it feels impossibly desolate, like some sort of frozen specter. All that remains of the work are photographs; the “monstrosity,” as it was deemed, was demolished after just eighty days due to public outrage.