Office of Environmental Management EM

From the Manhattan Project through the Cold War, the government produced plutonium and enriched uranium for nuclear weapons at sites such as Hanford in Washington state, Savannah River in South Carolina, Rocky Flats in Colorado, Idaho, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee, leaving vast quantities of radioactive and chemical waste. After production ended, the Energy Department created the Office of Environmental Management in 1989 to clean it up. It is led by an Assistant Secretary and is described by the department as the largest environmental cleanup program in the world.

EM has completed cleanup at more than ninety of the 107 sites it took on, including the former Rocky Flats weapons plant, which became a wildlife refuge. It manages the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the nation's only deep geologic repository for defense transuranic waste, which received its first shipment on March 26, 1999. The hardest remaining work is at Hanford, where about 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste sit in 177 underground tanks, some of which have leaked.

EM spends roughly $8 billion or more a year, and the estimated cost of finishing its work runs to hundreds of billions of dollars over decades. Projects to turn Hanford's tank waste into glass for disposal have run years behind schedule and billions over budget, and cleanup terms are set in legal agreements with state regulators and the Environmental Protection Agency. Supporters of steady funding say the government has a binding obligation to the affected communities, while critics and auditors have pressed for cheaper approaches and stronger contract oversight.