Introduction

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. From two o'clock until five, the United States built and ran a massive industrial complex that produced tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. At half past, the Cold War ended, and the United States shut down most of its nuclear weapons factories.

The second half of this cycle involves dealing with the waste and contamination from nuclear weapons production - a task that had, for the most part, been postponed into the indefinite future. That future is now upon us.

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 course of the environmental management program will be decided through broad public debate - both national and local. Where and how will we treat and dispose of the backlog of wastes from nuclear weapons production? How clean is clean? Should we exhume large volumes of contaminated soil in order to allow for unlimited use of the land in the future? Is plutonium a waste or a resource? To foster a sustained and informed public debate on these and other critical questions, we created this book. In it we use photographs as well as facts and figures, because only this combination can begin to convey the scale, the complexity, and the reality of the legacy we face, and the successes we have achieved so far.

Our hope is that this book will promote and inform broad-based citizen involvement so that we can move forward together in this difficult and compelling work.