Distrust of Government: No Longer Just a Conservative Issue

More and more these days, Americans are finding it difficult to trust their government. According to the Pew Research Center, only “two-in-ten of us say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right … ‘most of the time.’” Americans know their government breaks its promises. They feel, not without reason, that it’s often run by clowns and monsters. Some are so disenchanted they believe that our country can operate successfully in a virtual state of anarchy with government reduced to little more than shredded documents. Others even go so far as to think that protecting the public’s welfare can be “privatized” — taken away from the “consent of the governed” — and entrusted to big business, which has only one interest — to enrich and empower itself.

We in New Mexico know that political trust is fragile. It vanishes when the federal government does what all good parents tell their children never to do — break their promises, go back on their word.

Over the objections of the governor and many private citizens, that’s what the federal government is doing right now at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, working to break agreements that we’ve counted on for more than 30 years. Such political treachery shatters trust.

If it weren’t for the public mindedness of the governor and the good faith, wisdom and staying power of public safety advocates like The Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, and its Nuclear Waste Program Director, Don Hancock, we’d be paralyzed by a crisis in confidence that could leave us totally at the mercy of those in the federal government who seem to look upon New Mexico as a sacrifice zone, and treat its citizens as worthless victims unaware of the propaganda, exploitation and disrespect that’s plaguing them.

In the last two years or so, the notion of what is now being called “Forever WIPP” has risen though the bureaucratic swamp. It’s deeply troubling and offensive. The Department of Energy has proposed that WIPP’s mission be radically altered and that its long-foreseen end of operations, and projected closing date in 2024, be simply erased.

As Hancock told the New Mexico Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee in Carlsbad in July of 2021, expanding WIPP’s mission and extending its operation timeline indefinitely “is contrary to existing federal and state laws, the WIPP Permit, the New Mexico-DOE Consultation and Cooperation Agreement, and decades of promises made to the public — a social contract.”

WIPP is the country’s only “deep geological repository.” It’s designed to store low-level radioactive plutonium and uranium waste half a mile underground in salt beds for as long as 10,000 years. It’s one of only three such facilities in the world. Construction started on WIPP around 1979 and it opened for storage two decades later, receiving its first canisters of plutonium waste from Los Alamos National Laboratories in 1999.

For years, the federal government downplayed the dangers of storing “low- level waste.” It did everything it could to portray WIPP as a technological masterpiece, a fundamentally benign operation completely under the control of godlike bureaucratic engineers and physicists who would never let anything terrible happen because, we were told again and again, they knew best. Our fears of radioactivity were dismissed as the silly worries of ignorant provincials. But in 2014, the illusion of safety was destroyed. One of the tens of thousands of canisters buried in WIPP exploded, sending radioactive material through vents and into the atmosphere, where it traveled all the way to Carlsbad, more than 26 miles to the south, and contaminated more than 20 WIPP employees who were portrayed, predictably, as being in no danger at all. It took more than two years and a billion or more dollars to repair the damage, but some still contend the explosion damaged WIPP’s viability beyond repair.

In the 1970s, New Mexico was promised by the federal government that it would never have to store anything other than low-level, so called “transuranic” waste. It was always meant, New Mexican’s were led to believe, to be a “pilot project,” a test to see if such a storage facility in salt deposits could work. It was never meant to be “Forever WIPP,” expanding with no definite end in sight. And, we were led to believe, its mission would never change, and certainly never include the storage of tons and tons of different kinds of weapons-grade radioactive waste, “diluted” or not, upping the risk in ways that are not only deeply worrisome but clouded in national security obfuscation. The whole idea reeks of danger and betrayal.

In December last year, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that its environmental impact statement of WIPP’s proposed new role was available for public comment. That was a sure sign to many of us that “Forever WIPP” is already a done deal.

The DOE wants to dilute plutonium waste that results from making nuclear weapons and send it by a circuitous route to WIPP for permanent storage. Such an idea would require an immense expansion of the salt bed storage facility. The DOE would take waste and surplus plutonium from its bomb assembly operation at Pantex, near Amarillo, send it to Los Alamos where chemicals would be used to “dilute it,” whatever that means, ship it all the way across the country through countless communities to DOE’s Savannah River site in South Carolina where it will be “packaged,” and then ship it via railroad or trucking all the way back to WIPP.

As Scott Wyland of the Santa Fe New Mexican pointed out last April, “Plutonium is far more radioactive than the … contaminated gloves, equipment, clothing, soil and other materials” usually sent to WIPP. The “plutonium shipments,” he writes, “would travel through a dozen states and cover 3,000 miles,” putting millions of Americans at potential risk. A consortium of environmental and nuclear watchdogs in New Mexico strenuously oppose the plan and have raised a petition of some 1,104 signatures.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham supported that petition in a letter she wrote last April to the DOE in which she charged there was a “lack of meaningful and transparent public engagement from the DOE on waste clean-up, shipments, and long-term plans for the WIPP.”

The promises that would be broken by this plan are flabbergasting. And they deserve repeating — the new material to stored would grossly exceed the volume of waste currently permitted under federal law, storing far more dangerous material at WIPP than was ever contemplated when New Mexico signed agreements with the federal government in the 1970s. They would turn the promise of a temporary pilot project into a massive on-going storage effort that could eventually become the site for most, if not all, of the nation’s nuclear weapon debris and commercial radioactive waste.

If that gets forced down our throats, why would New Mexicans ever trust the federal government again?

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it