Posted September 16, 2007

Initiated at UC Santa Barbara in April 2007, the Student Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee (DOELOC) is an officially sanctioned UC student government body charged with investigating the activities of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; educating students, faculty, and the public about the nature of these activities; and lobbying and providing policymakers, the UC Regents, and Congress on issues related to nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear weapons. Students at other campuses are also working to establish DOELOC branches.

The UC Nuclear Free campaign actively supports the Student DOELOC through providing resources to DOELOC projects that are in alignment with UC Nuclear Free’s own projects and principles. The DOELOC is NOT a project of UC Nuclear Free, or vice versa. Rather, to reiterate, the DOELOC is a project that UCNF actively supports.

From the UC Nuclear Free campaign’s perspective, the need for the Student DOELOCs arises from the dramatic failure on the part of the UC Regents’ own Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committees to perform precisely those functions. As the UC Faculty Senate‘s Gerberding Committee noted in 1970, the Regents’ role with regard to the nuclear weapons labs is akin to that of a “benevolent absentee landlord.” In more than six decades of nuclear weapons lab management, the Regents have provided barely a shred of greater public accountability to the labs. In fact, the Regents have played a vital role in obscuring the central role these weapons labs play in driving US nuclear weapons policies and programs in new and more reckless directions, depositing radioactive toxins in communities throughout the American southwest and beyond, and bilking taxpayers out of billions of dollars.

Currently, there are plans to expand DOELOC to more UC campuses. Check back with UC Nuclear Free or DOELOC's website for updates.

Here's a link to the DOELOC web site.