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Introduction
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| There are a broad variety of
organizations that research and monitor the cleanup of the sites in the nuclear weapons
complex. With funding from The John Merck Fund, Resources for the Future's (RFF) Center
for Risk Management has created this Web page to provide interested researchers and others
a fast way to locate research, policy analysis, and information about environmental issues
at the nation’s former nuclear weapons production sites. The site includes approximately 100 links to about 50 organizations. Our goal is to create a useful – but not exhaustive – directory of resources available on the Internet. We have included not only a link to each organization's home page, but also directly to relevant documents and other useful resources. If you have suggestions of other sites not included here that you think should be added to this site, please email us at nwc@rff.org. Please note that if an organization is doing interesting work, but it is not described or available on their Web site (and this is the case for a number of organizations) we do not include it here. The site is organized into four main categories: 1. Recommended
Reading
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| About the Nuclear
Weapons Complex For nearly five decades, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessors engaged in a highly secretive, complex, and massive endeavor to fabricate nuclear weapons for national security purposes. Large-scale production of nuclear weapons was an unprecedented undertaking requiring thousands of facilities, dozens of large tracts of land, huge volumes of dangerous materials, and great quantities of water. With the Cold War's end, weapons production operations have largely ceased, and DOE has turned its attention to the health, safety, and environmental concerns linked to past nuclear weapons production activities. In 1989, DOE established the Office of Environmental Management (EM) to clean up contamination, manage nuclear and hazardous wastes, stabilize nuclear materials, and decontaminate and decommission nuclear facilities throughout the nuclear weapons complex. DOE has spent $50 billion on the EM program over the past ten years, and currently spends approximately $6 billion on EM activities each year – one third of DOE's total budget. The total remaining price tag is estimated to be somewhere between $150 and $200 billion, with over three-quarters of this money spent at just five sites: Hanford (WA), Savannah River (SC), Rocky Flats (CO), Oak Ridge (TN), and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (ID). |
| If you have
suggestions of additional links or comments on the Cleaning Up the Nuclear Weapons Complex Internet Resources pages, please e-mail nwc@rff.org. |