IEER's Global Outreach Project

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IEER's Global Outreach Project

In 1994, IEER launched its global outreach project in order to provide an international audience with the same accurate and understandable technical information that is the foundation of its reputation in the United States. IEER's global work covers a wide range of issues, including nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, plutonium disposition, energy policy, and nuclear-related environmental and health issues.

IEER's global project features a quarterly newsletter, Energy & Security, published in Russian, French, and Chinese. Selected articles are also available in Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. (The English-language edition of Energy & Security is Science for Democratic Action.) Energy & Security offers technical data, articles explaining technical information, and editorials written by experts both within IEER and from around the world. In its sixth year of publication, Energy & Security has been established as a principal technical and analytical resource on nuclear- and energy-related issues for activists, policy-makers, academics, and journalists. Energy & Security is free to all readers. If you would like to subscribe to Energy & Security, please contact IEER at michele@ieer.org.

In addition to publishing Energy & Security, IEER writes research reports, sponsors conferences, translates selected IEER materials, and provides technical assistance and outreach to activists and the media. IEER promotes networking and coordination among non-governmental organizations around the world working on nuclear issues. IEER also brings international perspectives to NGOs, media, and policymakers in the United States through its International Fellows program and translation of invited articles into English for publication in Science for Democratic Action.

IEER's current work includes:

Non-proliferation and plutonium disposition: IEER is part of a global effort to stop reprocessing and the use of plutonium fuel (known as mixed oxide or MOX fuel) and to encourage the adoption of an alternative plan for plutonium disposition: immobilization in ceramic and glass waste forms to put plutonium in non-weapons usable form.
Connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear power: IEER is working to counter a nuclear power revival in order to prevent increased security dangers, intensified radioactive pollution of the environment, and diversion of resources from sounder approaches to address global climate change.
Energy policy: IEER is promoting its comprehensive alternative approach for energy policy in the United States (see the report Securing the Energy Future of the United States: Oil, Nuclear, and Electricity Vulnerabilities and a post-September 11, 2001 Roadmap for Action) to counter the increased security vulnerabilities of the Bush Administration's energy plan.
De-alerting campaign: IEER provides technical advice and international outreach to the U.S. Back From the Brink campaign to de-alert all nuclear weapons. IEER has also published on de-alerting and its relation to nuclear disarmament.
Nuclear disarmament: IEER provides technical analyses on the role of laboratory fusion explosions in creating new types of nuclear weapons. According to IEER's analysis in Dangerous Thermonuclear Quest: The Potential of Explosive Fusion Research for the Development of Pure Fusion Weapons, the thermonuclear explosions that are planned for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the Laser Mégajoule, laser fusion machines currently under construction in the United States and France respectively, are illegal under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. IEER has also published a report on the U.S. Stockpile stewardship program, Nuclear Safety Smokescreen: Warhead Safety and Reliability and the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, analyzing its connections to new nuclear weapons design.
Nuclear waste management: IEER is opposing the development of transmutation, a process being promoted by the nuclear industry as a method of nuclear waste management, because it would create new waste management and proliferation issues. IEER published a report detailing the problems of transmutation, called The Nuclear Alchemy Gamble: An Assessment of Transmutation as a Nuclear Waste Management Strategy.
Coordination with the US project: IEER's global outreach work is closely coordinated with our technical work in the United States, where we have examined issues related to clean-up and water resources. We are also closely watching the work of the BEIR VII Committee of the US National Academy of Sciences, which is reviewing the health effects of low-level radiation (see IEER correspondence with the BEIR VII Committee).