GAP has a long history of monitoring nuclear energy and weapons plants to ensure that extremely hazardous materials are handled properly. This nuclear program, which featured many of GAP’s largest cases during the 1980s, fosters citizen activism and governmental accountability. We seek to reduce environmental, safety, health, and economic consequences of nuclear research and weapons development by protecting and advocating for whistleblowers at relevant corporations.
Specifically, our program has worked with impacted communities and grassroots organizations located near nuclear facilities to develop necessary responses to the environmental threats they face. During this time, GAP has helped nearly 1,000 nuclear workers expose corruption, health dangers and environmental threats at over twenty-five nuclear power and nuclear weapons facilities across the country. To this day, GAP continues to represent professional and field engineers who are continually pressured to ignore or cover-up serious safety, environmental and public health threats; and conduct extensive policy advocacy and public education.
In this area, GAP has a long history of monitoring the numerous problems at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State – the most contaminated place in the United States, and one of the largest environmental remediation projects in the world.
But our nuclear oversight extends far beyond Hanford, especially since our former Seattle Nuclear Oversight Office split off to solely focus on monitoring that site. GAP continues to monitor and take clients that involve whistleblower issues from numerous other nuclear sites from across the country. One notable figure is David Lee, who exposed that 2.2 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium went missing from the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (LANL).
In recent years, GAP has also taken a public stand with other groups against the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) – a federal plan designed to import the nuclear waste of other countries into the U.S., so that America could reprocess such “spent fuel.”
