Summary: From the 1940s, when the United States began to develop nuclear weapons, through the late 1980s, the government gave little attention to the environmental consequences of its activities. As a result, many Energy Department (DOE) sites are now contaminated with radioactive and hazardous wastes, and DOE faces the largest, most, complex cleanup in the country--estimated to cost up to $1 trillion. Although DOE received more than $23 billion between 1989 and 1993 to clean up contamination at the nuclear weapons complex, the agency has yet to actually complete the cleanup of a major facility. DOE's progress has been impeded by unrealistic agreements with the Environmental Protection Agency and the states to bring the facilities into compliance with federal environmental laws. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Nuclear Weapons Complex: Establishing a National Risk-Based Strategy for Cleanup, by Bernice Steinhardt, Associate Director for Energy and Science Issues, before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. GAO/T-RCED-95-120, Mar. 6, 1995 (15 pages).
