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.
But after meeting with a group of Navajos whose decades of labor in uranium mines had left them with a raft of illnesses, he drafted a bill to extend federal medical coverage for black lung disease — a chronic problem for coal miners — and to include nuclear workers.
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.