The Office of Environmental Management, whose mission is to clean up the environmental legacy of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, marked a milestone at the end of last month as we completed 84 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded projects across America.
 
During this time, 35,800 American workers demolished more than 5.79 million square feet of unusable facilities and disposed of more than 97,000 cubic meters of low-level and mixed low-level waste. We also advanced our mission to clean up the waste generated during the Cold War, by reducing that footprint by 613 square miles.
 
We exceeded our goals at many of the project sites. For example, at the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project in Utah, more than 2.6 million tons of waste from uranium ore mining was moved to a permanent disposal facility, far outpacing the original goal of shipping 2 million tons.

We were able to deliver on our overall goals under the Recovery Act ahead of schedule and under budget, while putting thousands of Americans to work and helping them to gain work experience and specialized skills that could position them into new careers in important nuclear industries.