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Overview
On a cold morning in December 1989, workers at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado
loaded the last plutonium "trigger" for a nuclear warhead into a tractor
trailer bound southeast to the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. No one knew
then that the nuclear weapon built with this plutonium trigger would be the
last one made in the United States for the foreseeable future. Until then, the
production of nuclear weapons had run continuously, beginning during World War
II with the startup of the first reactor to produce plutonium for the
top-secret Manhattan Project. But growing concerns about safety and
environmental problems had caused various parts of the weapons-producing
complex to be shut down in the 1980s. These shutdowns, at first expected to be
temporary, became permanent when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The
nuclear arms race of the Cold War came to a halt for the first time since the
invention of the atomic bomb. Quietly, a new era had begun.
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The Manhattan Project
The quest for nuclear explosives, driven by the fear that Hitler's Germany might
invent them first, was an epic, top-secret engineering and industrial venture
in the United States during World War II. The term "Manhattan Project" has
become a byword for an enormous breakneck effort involving vast resources and
the best scientific minds in the world. The workers on the Manhattan Project
took on a nearly impossible challenge to address a grave threat to the national
security.
From its beginning with Enrico Fermi's graphite-pile reactor under the bleachers
of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago to the fiery explosion of the first
atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the Manhattan Project took a little
less than 3 years to create a working atomic bomb. During that time, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers managed the construction of monumental plants to enrich
uranium, three production reactors to make plutonium, and two reprocessing
plants to extract plutonium from the reactor fuel. In 1939, Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Niels Bohr had argued that building an atomic bomb "can never be done
unless you turn the United States into one huge factory." Years later, he told
his colleague Edward Teller, "I told you it couldn't be done without turning
the whole country into a factory. You have done just that."
The Cold War and the Nuclear Weapons Complex
Shortly after World War II, relations between the United States and the Soviet
Union began to sour, and the Cold War ensued. Its most enduring legacy was the
nuclear arms race. It began during the Manhattan Project, when the Soviet Union
began to develop its own atomic bomb. In the United States, the nuclear arms
race resulted in the development of a vast research, production, and testing
network that came to be known as "the nuclear weapons complex." Some idea of
the scale of this enterprise can be understood from the cost: from the
Manhattan Project to the present, the United States spent approximately 300
billion dollars on nuclear weapons research, production, and testing (in 1995
dollars). During half a century of operations, the complex manufactured tens of
thousands of nuclear warheads and detonated more than one thousand.
At its peak, this complex consisted of 16 major facilities, including vast
reservations of land in the States of Nevada, Tennessee, Idaho, Washington, and South
Carolina. In its diversity, it ranged from tracts of isolated desert in Nevada,
where weapons were tested, to warehouses in downtown New York that once stored
uranium. Its national laboratories in New Mexico and California designed
weapons with production of various components in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and
Washington. Even now, long after some of the sites used in the nuclear
enterprise were turned over to other uses, the Department of Energy - the Federal
agency that controls the nuclear weapons complex - still owns 2.3 million acres of land
and 120 million square feet of buildings.
Civilian Control
Soon after the destructiveness of nuclear weapons was demonstrated by the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II, the U. S. Congress acted to put the immense
power and possibilities of atomic energy under civilian control. The Atomic
Energy Act of l946 established the Atomic Energy Commission, to administer and
regulate the production and uses of atomic power.
The work of the Commission expanded quickly from building a stockpile of nuclear
weapons to investigating peaceful uses of atomic energy (such as research on,
and the regulation of, the production of electrical power). It also conducted
studies on the health and safety hazards of radioactive materials.
In 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission was replaced by two new Federal agencies:
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was charged with regulating the
civilian uses of atomic energy (mainly commercial nuclear power plants), and
the Energy Research and Development Administration, whose duties included the
control of the nuclear weapons complex. In 1977, these duties were transferred
to the newly created Department of Energy.
Environmental Legacy of the Cold War
Like most industrial and manufacturing operations, the nuclear weapons complex
has generated waste, pollution, and contamination. However, many problems posed
by its operations are unlike those associated with any other industry. They
include unique radiation hazards, unprecedented volumes of contaminated water
and soil, and a vast number of contaminated structures ranging from reactors to
chemical plants for extracting nuclear materials to evaporation ponds.
Early in the nuclear age, scientists involved with the weapons complex raised
serious questions about its waste management practices. Shortly after the
establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission, its 12-man Safety and Industrial
Health Advisory Board reported that the "disposal of contaminated waste in
present quantities and by present methods...if continued for decades, presents
the gravest of problems."
The imperatives of the nuclear arms race, however, demanded that weapons
production and testing be given priority over waste management and the control
of environmental contamination.
Environmental Management
Although the nation continues to maintain an arsenal of nuclear weapons, as well
as some production capability, the United States has entered a new era, and the
Department of Energy has embarked on new missions. The most ambitious and
far-ranging of these missions is dealing with the environmental legacy of the
Cold War.
The Office of Environmental Management, commonly referred to as the
Environmental Management program, within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),
is responsible for environmental restoration, waste management, technology
development, and facility transition and management. This office was created in
1989 to consolidate responsibility within DOE for environmental management
activities. Before 1989, separate offices within DOE had responsibility for
nuclear- and nonnuclear-related cleanup at sites and facilities across the
nation, but it was difficult to coordinate and prioritize these activities
without central management. In establishing the Environmental Management
program, DOE centralized these responsibilities and demonstrated its commitment
to environmental cleanup. Environmental Management's goals include complying
with all applicable laws and regulations, incorporating public input,
protecting human health and safety, and emphasizing environmental
responsibility within DOE.
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