Buried in President Bush’s proposed budget for next year is a story of broken promises. Bush wants to increase spending on every major category of the government’s nuclear programme except one: cleaning up the toxic legacy that lurks at nuclear reservations and facilities around the nation. The administration wants more funding for nuclear weaponry, nuclear energy, nuclear science and management. But it would spend $800 million less on environmental cleanups at 20 nuclear sites in 14 states. Its request for cleanups at nuclear sites in several states is the lowest since 1997.

Federal cleanups are not yet completed in Washington state, New York, South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, California, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Nevada or Utah. The government is turning its back on long-standing commitments.

Nothing better illustrates why America must clean up the enormous quantities of waste at these sites than Hanford, the country’s most-contaminated federal nuclear reservation in south-central Washington. Here, the United States produced weapons-grade plutonium, unlocking the code to the power that helped win the Cold War. (Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.) The legacy of that era is a witches’ brew of the world’s most dangerous materials, housed in half-century-old storage tanks, that are contaminating nearby soils and aquifers.

Will America keep its promises and clean up this toxic legacy? Will the nation and Congress allow the administration to turn its back on millions of Americans? Success won’t come easily. Conscientious Americans must join the states that are living with unfinished nuclear cleanups to compel the Energy Department to get its programme moving again.

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