The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability has published its new report, Accountability Audit, in advance of its 29th Annual DC Days, and just one day after a tunnel containing radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Site in Washington State. The lack of investment in comprehensive cleanup at Hanford is just one of many issues ANA tackles in this important new report.

As President Ronald Reagan said in his 1984 State of the Union address, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?”

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is doing the exact opposite of what President Reagan suggested thirty-three years ago. NNSA’s many in-process and planned programs to “modernize” or extend the lives of nuclear warheads, along with its ambitions to pour tens of billions of dollars into the nuclear weapons production
complex, would ensure that the United States continues to possess nuclear arms through the end of the 21st century. Some Life Extension Programs seem designed precisely to make the nuclear bombs and warheads more “useable” in a battlefield scenario.

This report, prepared by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, details many of the problems at Department of Energy nuclear facilities and what must change in order to produce results that benefit the environment and the American people.