Robert Alvarez, 76, Dies; Called Attention to Nuclear-Waste Safety
A self-taught expert, he spent decades working in both nonprofits and the government to expose problems in the production of atomic weapons.
Robert Alvarez, a self-taught expert on nuclear power, nuclear weapons and the waste that both produce who worked for decades as an activist outside the government and, during the 1990s, as a high-ranking official within it, died on July 1 in Virginia Beach, Va. He was 76.
His daughter Amber Alvarez Torgerson said he died in an assisted living facility from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Alvarez did not set out to become a key voice in the campaign to clean up America’s vast and deadly network of nuclear-waste sites. As a young legislative aide for Senator James Abourezk, a Democrat from South Dakota, in the mid-1970s, he focused mainly on American Indian affairs.
To his surprise and frustration, his bill never even got a hearing. He was told that it would cast a negative light on the nuclear energy and weapons industries, powerful forces with extensive pull on Capitol Hill.
After the bill was killed, Mr. Alvarez went to work for the Environmental Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, where he dived into the murky question of what America did with its millions of gallons of nuclear waste.
What he found shocked even him, a child of the counterculture who had long been skeptical of government motives. The nuclear weapons industry was largely exempt from federal oversight. Contaminated water was often poured into streams and lakes. Storage containers built in the 1950s were starting to leak.
“Basically you had a system that was deliberately set up under conditions of secrecy, isolation and privilege where they weren’t accountable to anyone but themselves,” he told NPR in 2000.
Mr. Alvarez was half of an antinuclear power couple: His wife, Kitty Tucker, was a public-interest lawyer who raised awareness of the case of Karen Silkwood, a whistle-blower at a plutonium plant who died under suspicious circumstances.
In 1986 he joined the staff of Senator John Glenn, the Ohio Democrat and former astronaut, who tasked him with working on legislation to compensate people the government had exposed to radiation, either incidentally or at times, as Mr. Alvarez showed, on purpose, as part of medical tests.
Soon after he joined Senator Glenn’s staff, someone leaked him evidence documenting extensive safety failures at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, which produced plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons.
He in turn shared that evidence with The New York Times, which unpacked the story in a three-month series that helped expose the environmental and health dangers of nuclear-weapon production. It was just one of many times that he worked closely with reporters on atomic-safety issues.
“He had the gift of telling you something that’s wonderful to quote that gets at the core of the issue,” said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, an antinuclear research group.
Mr. Alvarez later worked for six years as a senior adviser in the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton. In that post, he continued to press for better transparency around nuclear waste and better benefits for those exposed to it.
In 1994 and 1995 he led teams to North Korea to inspect the country’s reactor sites, part of negotiations around its nuclear-weapons program.
By then, Mr. Alvarez was a fixture in the halls of Congress, standing out as much for his trademark New Balance sneakers and thick mustache as for his firm command of nuclear policy and politics. He remained so even after he left government in 1999.
“He was compelled by the problem and its real world impacts,” Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary and chief of staff at the department, said in an interview. “It helped a lot that he was a master of both the inside and the outside game.”
Robert Jason Alvarez was born on Sept. 18, 1948, in Grove City, Pa., and grew up in nearby Youngstown, Ohio. He spoke Spanish at home: His father, Floyd, a steelworker, had immigrated from the Galicia region of Spain, and his mother, Angela (Garcia) Alvarez, a restaurant server, was the daughter of immigrants from Madrid.
He studied music theory at Youngstown State University but left shortly before graduation. He then joined the Peace Corps but quit after a few months, after which he served as a medic in the Army, deployed to Germany.
Returning to the United States, he put his newfound medical skills to use at a free clinic in Eugene, Ore. There he met Ms. Tucker, a local activist, who persuaded him to move with her to Washington in 1973. They married the next year.
Ms. Tucker died in 2019. Along with their daughter Amber, Mr. Alvarez is survived by another daughter, Kerry Rochester, and two grandchildren. His stepson, Shawn Tucker, died in 1994.
After leaving the Department of Energy, Mr. Alvarez returned to the nonprofit sector as a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank, and as a frequent contributor to journals like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, where he continued to write about the health and environmental impacts of America’s nuclear industry.
“He was very true to his working-class roots,” Dr. Makhijani said. “He always cared a lot about people who had suffered as a result of corporate or governmental misdeeds. That was the root of his passion.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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