THE clean-up of the nuclear weapons production complex in the United States presents a daunting array of technical challenges, which science will play an important role in meeting. Hazel O'Leary's energy department has made some progress toward injecting technical and administrative cohesion into the vast programme. If, as expected, O'Leary leaves at the end of the year, the acceleration of this process will be the top priority of her successor. The litany of problems surrounding the 64-billion dollar-a-year programme began at its outset, in 1989, with the failure properly to integrate science and technology into its core. As a result, the programme has lacked technical direction. Tens of thousands of people are engaged in the work, which is supposed to lead to the environmental remediation of a chain of huge former weapons production plants across the United States. But experts have fiercely criticized the Department of Energy (DoE)'s management of the programme, claiming that many of its approaches are expensive and technically misguided (see pages 375-379).
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