It’s all a scam, a bunko bait and switch, a confidence game working to sell New Mexicans on the “upside” of their state becoming the National Latrine for America’s military and commercial nuclear waste.
The government and commercial energy producers want to put their radioactive excrement in New Mexico simply because we are poor, easy marks for pie-in-the-sky deceptions, and out of sight, out of mind to most of the rest of the country and the world. They want to dump the unintended consequences of weapons of mass destruction here, and the poison waste from the feel good compensation of nuclear power plants, because they think no one will care, because they think we are missing in the consciousness of most Americans.
But we are not really, as the old joke used to go in New Mexico Magazine’s monthly feature “One of Our Fifty is Missing,” a place that’s hilariously overlooked all the time by map makers and airhead journalists. Real people live here. And real people suffer when something goes wrong with handling the most toxic materials on earth.
Two outrageous nuclear movidas are in the works right now in New Mexico. The first involves “redefining” the nature of high-level nuclear waste, diminishing the definition of its hazardous risk, so that new, vastly more dangerous plutonium contaminated materials can be stored at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico. WIPP was designed, and with solemn promises, never to hold anything but low-level nuclear waste. The other movida involves moving the entire 80,000 to 120,000 metric tons of so-called spent radioactive fuel rods from nuclear power plants around the nation to New Mexico for “temporary” storage. That word “temporary” is the scam. Anyone in their right mind can see a con like that moving across an infinity of neverending temporary promises, never to be broken because the “temporary” they speak of is open to redefinition by any one in power at any time.
So we have before us two bogus nuclear re-definitions. The question is are we going to be hoodwinked, or are we going to rise up in the secure knowledge that a skunk is a skunk by any other name?
The temporary storage of all the country’s spent fuel rods in the “desert” 35 miles east of Carlsbad on the road to Hobbs has been proposed by Holtec International, which has created a design scheme that makes the storage site of 1,000 acres look like a vast game board with uniform square nobs that contain the fuel rods as well as conceal the hazards of slow cancerous death.
America has 60 nuclear power plants in 30 states, according to the National Geographic. And if nuclear energy advocates manage to con us into believing that nuclear power is a source of “renewable energy,” equivalent to, and even better than wind or solar energy, which of course produces no hazardous waste to speak of, we’re likely to have many more. And Holtec International will have to buy more acreage in New Mexico’s nuclear corridor, where WIPP and the uranium enrichment plant near Eunice happen to reside. That little patch of nowhere might become the most toxic real estate in America.
The real problem, though, is not just the storage of hot waste in the middle of the most prosperous fracking oil and gas field in the country, with more wells and drills than you can shake a stick at, it’s the transportation. Spent fuel rods are so heavy that they have to be transported by rail. That means the radioactive waste from the huge number of nuke power plants in the south and on the east coast, along with those in Washington state, California and Arizona would be passing through countless American towns over the next 40 years or so. America has seen 19 serious train accidents since the turn of this century and 100 in the 20th century. Talk about a movida! Moving this stuff around the country on the rails is literally a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.
And if the Holtec site really is “temporary,” then we’ll have cart the stuff out by rail all over again, endangering new cities, towns and hamlets along the way to its final destination.
Redefining certain kinds of high-level plutonium waste as being the equivalent of low-level waste is as preposterous a con as it sounds. Real low level waste is dangerous enough, so dangerous it has to be buried a half a mile underground at WIPP. And the redefined high-level “low-level” nuclear waste will be hot, not “spent” like commercial waste, a ridiculous euphemism at its best, but close to the hottest military waste there is around.
The big question, though, is who will do the re-defining? The DOE? Probably. But the DOE is part of the executive branch. And WIPP was created and defined by an act of Congress, not by executive action or order. It is from this perspective that Don Hancock, the most trusted and savvy citizen nuclear expert from the Southwest Research and Information Center, feels that a DOE redefinition would be unconstitutional.
If really hot nuke waste does end up in WIPP, it would not only be an overheated physical danger to the whole underground operation, it would also be one more reason why Americans should never, ever trust the government when it comes to making long-range promises about nuclear waste. Lie, deceit, deception and betrayal are the rule of thumb, it would appear. Nothing else.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
V.B., this is another necessary column. It is so important to know these things, so we can mobilize against them. I can’t help fearing that the deck is stacked against us, but it is a fight worth pursuing.
A very well written article by V.B., which should be read by everybody as an eye opener! Thanks!