"The infighting among the federal officials in charge of the Savannah River Site, a federally owned nuclear site in South Carolina that won one of the country’s biggest pots of stimulus money, is so severe that it threatens to undermine public confidence in their work, a federal watchdog warned Thursday.

The watchdog, the Department of Energy’s inspector general, conducted a wide-ranging inquiry into a host of accusations that have been swirling ever since relations between the department officials who work at the site and those who oversee them from Washington broke down last summer. The resulting report was inconclusive about many of the specific accusations that had been made, but highlighted what it called an 'unusual level of distrust and acrimony' among officials in charge of the highly contaminated nuclear site."

Michael Cooper reports for the New York Times December 31, 2009. [2]