Ed Markey: “some of my colleagues may not be aware of this, but for over 30 years, we had a special supersecret bureaucracy that ran…”

“some of my colleagues may not be aware of this, but for over 30 years, we had a special supersecret bureaucracy that ran our Nation's nuclear weapons programs. It was not subject to effective external oversight or accountability. It was called the Atomic Energy Agency. For years, the old AEC pursued a philosophy of production first, and public health and safety and environment be damned. What was the AEC's legacy? It funded hundreds of unethical experiments on human beings using radioactive materials. It allowed workers to be exposed to radioactive substances in Paducah, Kentucky, and Fernald, Ohio. It allowed for the venting of gases from Hanford, Washington, to the Nevada test site, to Fernald, Ohio. It wantonly and repeatedly dumped toxic wastes into the soil at its weapons production sites, buried radioactive materials in shallow, unlined pits: Rocky Flats; Savanna River; Los Alamos; Paducah, Kentucky. We disbanded the Atomic Energy Agency and put it over into the Department of Energy so we could have some accountability. What are we doing here today? What we are doing here today is we are going back to the bad old days where we are going to have an agency focused on making bombs hidden from public site, causing environmental havoc, public health catastrophes, and then the very same kind of a formula that allowed for the lying and concealment of actions from the public.”