SRS Museum – Defense, Deterrence, and Discovery
SRS Museum – Defense, Deterrence, and Discovery
Client
Location
Services Performed
Findings
The exhibit features focused interpretation areas: Site construction, heavy water production, reactor operations, separations, and safety and security. Each corner is devoted to a specific theme that includes interactives and traditional interpretation. A wall-sized lightbox mural overlooks the exhibit space that shows the historical reach of the SRS and its products and contributions.
Defense, Deterrence, and Discovery is a permanent interpretive exhibit that New South installed in the North Gallery at the Savannah River Site Museum in Aiken, South Carolina. Funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration, this exhibit focuses on the multi-step processes that the Savannah River Site used to produce plutonium and tritium during the Cold War and beyond.
During the planning process for this exhibit, New South arranged to have two large artifacts from the Cold War Curation Facility conserved and put on display. The first is a 1951 building model of the Physics Assembly Laboratory that functions as the centerpiece of the exhibit. Three dimensional models such as this were used extensively by DuPont, the Site designers and construction force, to ensure safe, flexible construction at SRP. This model shows the process area under the high hat within the Physics Assembly Laboratory (Building 777-M) commonly referred to as “Triple 7.” The second artifact is an enormous three-dimensional topographic map which lights up different areas of the 312-square mile site and is especially popular with school groups that visit the museum.
Also on display is a reactor tank model created by the Savannah River National Laboratory. Above this model hangs a replica of a rod assembly that New South had fabricated for the exhibit. Together, these two items give the visitor a glimpse of what the interior of an SRS reactor looks like.
To help explain some of the more technical aspects of the exhibit, New South created Roddy, a cartoon uranium rod. Roddy is the star of a video that shows his transition from a raw slug of uranium to plutonium, highlighting the different plant processes that made that change possible. Roddy even travels through the galaxy as a puck of Plutonium-238, which was used to power space flight.