Atomic Energy Commission AEC

After the atomic bombings of 1945, Congress debated whether the military or civilians should control the new technology. The Atomic Energy Act, signed by President Harry Truman on August 1, 1946, placed it under a five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission, which took over the Army's Manhattan Project facilities and laboratories on January 1, 1947. A powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress oversaw it.

The AEC ran the nuclear weapons complex during the early Cold War, building and testing atomic and hydrogen bombs at sites such as Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and the Nevada Test Site, and expanding uranium mining and production. After President Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech on December 8, 1953, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 opened nuclear technology to private industry, and the AEC both promoted the commercial nuclear power industry and licensed and regulated its reactors. It also funded research in physics and medicine through the national laboratories.

Critics increasingly argued that one agency could not credibly both promote nuclear power and police its safety, especially amid disputes over reactor safety standards, radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing, and secrecy. The Energy Reorganization Act, signed on October 11, 1974, abolished the AEC effective January 19, 1975, giving its regulatory duties to the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its weapons and research programs to the Energy Research and Development Administration, which became part of the Department of Energy in 1977. Historians credit the AEC with building the nation's nuclear deterrent and nuclear power industry, while critics point to the health and environmental costs that later came to light.