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Please join the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) and Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) on Saturday, March 19, 2022 from 3-4:30pm ET (12-1:30pm PT), as we honor Bob Alvarez with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Register here.
(once you register you’ll be invited to Kudoboard—if the link doesn’t work use https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/7fn7aiLg or the one in the next sentence)
We’re collecting stories and gratitude for Bob on this kudoboard. Click this link to create a post. Preference is for videos, but you can also post photos and write messages too. Feel free to make more than one post. This is a great place to share old photos, stories, and words of gratitude for Bob’s work. This will be up for Bob to peruse and we may pull some videos to incorporate into the online award event.
We are also collecting photos of Bob for the event, please email photos directly to Liz Mattson at lizm@hanfordchallenge.org.
Robert (Bob) Alvarez is one of the bedrock founders of the national movement to unmask the human and environmental carnage that resulted directly from the US production of a massive nuclear arsenal.
Bob helped found the Environmental Policy Institute in the mid-1970’s. He is an intrepid researcher, author, investigator, professor, and an unflagging resource to dozens of organizations around the nation. Bob always was and remains today an ally (and sometimes an accomplice) of grassroots efforts to hold the nuclear power and weapons establishment accountable.
Bob was one of the first to document the impacts of nuclear weapons and power production on front-line workers in his 1982 book, Killing Our Own. He helped organize the Atomic Veterans hearings when Congress turned its back on the thousands of soldiers deliberately marched into the fallout from live nuclear weapons tests. He and his wife Kitty Tucker worked tirelessly to reveal the story behind the killing of Karen Silkwood, and to seek justice for Karen and her family.
Bob served for five years as a Senior Investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator John Glenn, and as one of the Senate’s primary staff experts on U.S. nuclear programs. While serving for Senator Glenn, Bob worked to help establish the environmental cleanup program in the Department of Energy, strengthened the Clean Air Act, uncovered several serious nuclear safety and health problems, improved medical radiation regulations, and created a transition program for communities and workers affected by the closure of nuclear weapons facilities.
Between 1993 and 1999, Bob served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment. While at DOE, he coordinated the effort to enact nuclear worker compensation legislation. He also compelled the release of critical information, long withheld from the public, about the impacts of nuclear testing. In 1994 and 1995, Bob led teams in North Korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials. He coordinated nuclear material strategic planning for the department and established the department’s first asset management program. Bob was awarded two Secretarial Gold Medals, the highest awards given by the department.
Bob authored numerous groundbreaking reports on the potentially devastating impacts of nuclear power and waste including irradiated fuel pool risks and the dangers of consolidated “interim” storage and continues to serve as an expert witness for intervenors.
Since his retirement from the Energy Department, Bob has continued to address nuclear safety issues. He continues to work at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He has taught a nuclear history course at Johns Hopkins, continues to write reports and articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and elsewhere.
Hope to see you on Sat March 19th at 3pm ET (noon PT)!
Bob Alvarez Lifetime Achievement Award Committee
Tom, Liz, Kevin, Diane, Ralph
Ukraine has 15 active nuclear reactors in four locations, excluding the destroyed plant at Chernobyl. With the war in progress, why is nobody talking about the dangers of one or more being hit by Russian firepower? Or rockets hitting nuclear waste storage in Ukraine? The results could make Chernobyl look like a firecracker. Thom is joined by Beyond Nuclear's radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps. See the recording here.
July 30, 2022