Closing the Circle on the Splitting of the Atom; The Environmental Legacy of Nuclear Weapons Production in the United States and What the Department of Energy is Doing About It

28 cm. xiv, 106 pages. Wraps. Illustrations. Maps. Glossary. For Further Reading. This report was the first report published in the new Departmental era of openness that described existing environmental, safety, and health problems throughout the nuclear weapons complex and the cleanup challenges that DOE faced. It also provided initial plans for what DOE was doing to address these problems. In the grand scheme of things we are a little more than halfway through the cycle of splitting the atom for weapons purposes. If we visualize this historic cycle as the full sweep of a clockface, at zero hour we would find the first nuclear chain reaction by Enrico Fermi, followed immediately by the Manhattan Project and the explosion of the first atomic bombs. Dealing with the environmental legacy of the Cold War is in many ways as big a challenge for us today as the building of the atomic bomb was for the Manhattan Project pioneers in the 1940s. Our challenges are political and social as well as technical, and we are meeting those challenges. We are reducing risks, treating wastes, developing new technologies, and building democratic institutions for a constructive debate on our future course. The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) mission is to address the nation's Cold War environmental legacy resulting from five decades of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. This legacy includes some of the world's most dangerous radioactive sites with large amounts of radioactive wastes, spent nuclear fuel (SNF), excess plutonium and uranium, thousands of contaminated facilities, and contaminated soil and groundwater. Created in 1989, EM has the responsibility for completing the cleanup of this Cold War legacy and managing the remaining nuclear materials. As the largest environmental cleanup program in the world, EM has been charged with the responsibility of cleaning up 107 sites across the country whose area is equal to the combined area of Rhode Island and Delaware. EM has made substantial progress in nearly every area of nuclear waste cleanup.…