Two leave hospital after SRS chemical spillage

Two of the three workers taken to an Augusta hospital Tuesday after being injured in a chemical spill at the Savannah River Site were released. A third worker is still being evaluated for a burn on his arm.

The names of the victims taken to the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital were not released.

Four other workers were evaluated by on-site medical personnel, said Will Callicott, spokesman for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.

The injured workers were part of a crew that was preparing an F Area facility for removal of process piping about 7:45 a.m., Callicott said. About a pint to a quart of nitric acid spilled, he said.

F Area is a former chemical processing complex, where plutonium was made, that was deactivated in 2006. Nitric acid was used in the plutonium production process.

No radioactive material was released, Callicott said.

Details of how the incident occurred were not available.

SRS officials will begin a fact-finding effort to determine what happened, Callicott said.

Nitric acid can cause eye, mucous membrane and skin irritation, according to the Center for Disease Control.

F Area was started in the 1950s and produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, a third of all plutonium produced in the United States was produced there, according to the SRS website.

Coincidently, there also was a nitric acid spill at a waste-processing facility at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee on Tuesday morning.

According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, the incident happened around 11:45 a.m. as the material was being

offloaded from a tanker truck into a holding tank. It was contained within the building.

Four people were evacuated from the building, which is in the main campus area. The spill was considered a low-level incident, according to the newspaper.