USA Today
Whit Gibbons opens the throttle on his small skiff and races across the Savannah River, slamming to a stop in a tangle of tree branches hanging over the south bank. In the bow, Cameron Young stabs at a branch and comes up triumphantly with a squirming—and very large—brown water snake.
For Gibbons, a University of Georgia ecologist, and Young, a graduate student, it's just another critter-rich day in one of the nation's most unusual outdoor labs.
The two herpetologists are among dozens of scientists attached to the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a research facility in the middle of a 300-square-mile (800-square-kilometer) federal property carved out as a nuclear weapons plant site a half-century ago. For much of the Cold War, the Savannah River Site, 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Augusta, Georgia, produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs.
As a result, it is one of the most heavily polluted places on earth.
But in a grand irony, this facility—along with a handful of other large weapons plants in Colorado, Washington state, Idaho and Tennessee that were walled off from the outside world for decades—also is a treasure-trove of biological diversity.
One unintended benefit of the race to produce weapons of mass destruction has been the protection of huge islands of wildlife habitat. With the arms race largely over, these sites, for all their ghastly contaminants, are increasingly being recognized as key refuges for wildlife largely unaffected by the nuclear and chemical pollution.
Ninety percent of the Savannah River site has been virtually undisturbed for decades. It contains a rich mix of ecosystems: hardwood and pine forests, Carolina bay wetlands, cypress-tupelo swamps.
The plant and animal life is breathtaking—and has been documented by the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory since the early 1950s, with most research conducted outside of highly contaminated areas. Here, there are more than 240 species of birds, more than 100 species of reptiles and amphibians, and nearly 100 species of freshwater fish. A creek running through the site has the greatest diversity of invertebrates of any in the Western Hemisphere.
The largest alligator ever found in South Carolina—more than 13 feet (4 meters) long—came from here, and the largemouth bass are an angler's dream. These are not nuclear mutants, simply specimens grown large because they are not hunted or fished. ''It's a pretty simple formula,'' Gibbons says. ''The best protection for the environment is no people.''
What about having all this surrounding a plant struggling to deal with 35 million gallons (130 million liters) of high-level nuclear waste and a devil's brew of toxic chemicals? ''It's ironical, it's paradoxical,'' he says.
But hardly unique.
On the outskirts of Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was built by the Army during World War II to produce mustard gas and incendiary weapons. Later, agricultural chemicals were produced there, and at the height of the Cold War, nerve gas. Now, even as a U.S. $2 billion environmental cleanup proceeds, the 27-square-mile (70-square-kilometer) arsenal has been transformed into a national wildlife refuge.
