Robert Alvarez and Arjun Makhijani wrote “Radioactive Waste: Hidden Legacy of the Arms Race,” published by MIT’s Technology Review in its August/September 1988 (pages 42-52) issue.
It begins:
With over $24 billion in physical assets, an annual budget of about $8 billion, and a land base larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, the U.S. government’s program for producing nuclear weapons would rank toward the top of the Fortune 500. Like many private industries, this one has a major hazardous-waste problem. For the past four decades, a network of 280 facilities at some 20 weapons-making sites has produced massive quantities of highly radioactive waste. Because the Department of Energy runs these facilities in secret, with virtually no outside oversight from either Congress or environmental agencies, this dangerous material has been stored and buried in ways that threaten employees and the public.
To read more, go to the whole issue, which is available for $6.99 (as of 2017).
“Radioactive Waste: Hidden Legacy of the Arms Race” won the first John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, in 1989.