[Congressional Bills 106th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[S. 618 Introduced in Senate (IS)]







106th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                 S. 618

  To provide for the declassification of the journal kept by Glenn T. 
   Seaborg while serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.


_______________________________________________________________________


                   IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

                             March 15, 1999

 Mr. Moynihan introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
               Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
  To provide for the declassification of the journal kept by Glenn T. 
   Seaborg while serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. FINDINGS.

    (1) Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg was a truly great American who made 
indispensable contributions in the development of nuclear energy.
    (2) Dr. Seaborg was the co-discoverer of plutonium and eight other 
elements and as a result of these discoveries was awarded the 1951 
Nobel Prize for chemistry.
    (3) While serving as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission 
(AEC), Dr. Seaborg maintained a journal consisting of a diary, 
correspondence, announcements, minutes of meetings, and other documents 
of historical value.
    (4) In preparing the journal, Dr. Seaborg took care to include only 
information which was not classified and could be made public.
    (5) Before leaving the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Seaborg 
submitted the journal to the AEC's Division of Classification for 
review.
    (6) Dr. Seaborg's journal was cleared by the Division of 
Classification, virtually without deletion.
    (7) Twelve years later, in 1983, the chief historian at the 
Department of Energy asked to borrow a copy of Dr. Seaborg's journal in 
order to write a history of the AEC.
    (8) When the journal was returned to Dr. Seaborg three years later, 
passage after passage was redacted, including explicitly public 
information, such as the published code names of nuclear weapons tests, 
and purely personal material, such as his description of accompanying 
his children on a ``trick or treat'' outing one Halloween evening.

SEC. 2. DECLASSIFICATION OF SEABORG JOURNAL.

    The Secretary of Energy shall surrender Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg's 
journal, which he prepared while serving as Chairman of the AEC, to Dr. 
Seaborg's estate. The journal shall be returned in the original, 
unredacted form in which it was lent to the Department of Energy in 
1983.
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