The United States Department of Energy's Environmental Management Program

The year 2009 marks 20 years since the Environmental Management program was first established in the Department of Energy. At that time, nearly 50 years of nuclear activity had left a legacy that included nuclear waste and environmental contamination at more than 100 sites across the United States. The extent of the risk to our citizens and communities was unknown, and certainly many of the processes and technologies to reduce that risk had not yet been invented. Since then, the Department of Energy has closed 86 of 108 sites originally assigned to the program nationwide. The Department of Energy has packaged and safely stored the nation’s entire excess plutonium inventory. The Department has pioneered new technologies that have allowed progress in retrieving millions of liters of tank waste and safely disposing of tens of thousands of cubic meters of transuranic waste. In Fiscal years 2006 and 2007 alone, the Department of Energy demolished approximately 500 buildings (nuclear, radioactive, and industrial) as part of our decontamination and decommissioning projects. Finally, there have been great strides in restoring groundwater contaminated with radionuclides using innovative treatment systems. In August 2005, a rigorous project management system was instituted. This Department of Energy program was built on the principle of prioritizing risk reduction supported by our four guiding tenets of safety, performance, clean-up, and closure. The mission activities at our clean-up sites are targeted at our highest risk activities. In planning its environmental clean-up efforts and developing the budget for those activities, the Department seeks to focus on work that will produce the greatest environmental benefit and the largest amount of risk reduction.