The American Dark Ages: All Politics and All Pollution Is Still Local

Many of us are feeling swamped by what’s become our daily dose of terror news. We’re struggling to learn how not to drown in adrenaline and an overflow of stress hormones produced by the scare machine of modern yellow journalism as it’s practiced by mainstream American news corporations and social media. There’s no end to it.

It’s hard to not fall into conspiracy thinking, into believing this Republican Chaos has been designed to leave us all feeling disempowered, useless, politically paralyzed and expecting a MAGA supernova to burn up the Constitution at any moment.

When we get overrun like that, we miss so much of what’s going on at home. And we get no perspective on how Washington madness trickles down to poison our sanity and suck up our savings.

We don’t hear a peep, for instance, in the local news about the ominous realities of a resurgent nuclear industry, about the thousands of new plutonium warheads to be smelted and assembled here and in Georgia. Nor do we hear about the renewed pressure to start up dangerous uranium mining west of Albuquerque and around New Mexico, and almost nothing about federally-regulated (soon, perhaps, to be deregulated) nuclear sites like WIPP, Urenco, and the proposed Holtec Industries nuclear dumping grounds.   

It seems clear now that the GOP’s infatuation with the ludicrous reality of “clean” nuclear power could turn southern New Mexico into an even larger radioactive litter box than it already is.

It’s true that New Mexicans, we lucky ones who live on a blue island in the middle of the bloody red Southwest, have a surprisingly rich local media, with some 30 newspapers, most of them weeklies, more than 60 news websites, including those of the state’s 28 TV stations. But it doesn’t do us much good. Most outlets here pull copy off national wires, rewrite Albuquerque Journal stories, or go with the yellow stream of nonsense big corporate news uses to stink up our minds.

There are, for sure, some excellent online news sources here — largely invisible, I’m sorry to say — that deserve our attention and financial support. They include Searchlight New Mexico, New Mexico In Depth, New Mexico Political Report, and Environment New Mexico. Organizations that disseminate trustworthy information — like Southwest Research and Information Center, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Conservation Voters of New Mexico, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, the Southwest Alliance for a Safe Future — all do, too.

With Republican cheerleading and support, the military and nuclear power industry in America could become a booming profit center, and most of the lethal hazardous waste these companies generate could end up here in New Mexico. We’re talking about the users of nuclear fuel and the producers of “spent” waste, companies like Duke Energy, Exelon, Dominion, Public Service Enterprise Group, Pacific Gas and Electric — all of whom operate civilian nuclear power reactors. There are 94 commercial operating power reactors across 54 power plants in 28 states. Other big nuke-interested corporations include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and BWX Technologies. By my count, federal contracts with such corporations amount to close to half a trillion dollars.

Where they put their hazardous waste is of deep financial importance to them, and an incalculably gigantic public health risk for us.

Take Holtec Industries. Despite recent setbacks in federal court, and intense opposition from New Mexico’s congressional delegation, state government, local citizen activists and even members of the New Mexico oil and gas association, Holtec doubtless will be emboldened by the GOP’s nuclear proclivities to press on with its quest to store most of the nation’s commercial radioactive spent fuel rods in southeastern New Mexico. It’s plan, licensed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), is to remove this deadly stuff from where it is safely stored and guarded on site at reactors and power plants all over the country, and transport it at great risk on rail lines that run through hundreds of cities and towns across the nation and New Mexico and store it “temporarily” in Lea County near Hobbs.  The 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals last April invalidated Holtec’s license to do such a thing, holding that the NRC didn’t have the statutory authority to issue that kind of license in the first place. But the present nuclear leaning of the federal government by the demolition derby of the Republican party gives Holtec a better chance to prevail in the long run than it has ever had.

The same is true for the proposed expansion of the massive underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, some 65 miles away from Holtec’s proposed site. Virtually everyone in New Mexico except the business communities of southeastern New Mexico is opposed to the federal government expanding WIPP to hold far more so-called “low-level plutonium wastes” from nuclear weapons manufacture than it once solemnly promised never to do when WIPP’s existence was negotiated in the 1980s and 1990s.

The opposition to such an idea is generally known as “stop Forever WIPP.” The half-mile deep salt caverns that hold the nuclear waste were supposed to stop receiving new shipments in 2024. But with a new shaft being drilled, it seems clear that the present Republican-run Department of Energy (DOE) will press harder than ever to keep WIPP open to at least 2080 or longer. The DOE could also try to force New Mexico to forego taking “low-level” plutonium waste and start storing the really hot stuff, which it also promised it would never do.

With the United States “modernizing” its nuclear weapons stockpile, producing up to 80 new plutonium pits a year for who knows how long, many of them manufactured in Los Alamos, the pressure to store more hot radioactive waste at WIPP could become next to impossible to withstand. Add to that pressure the almost certain attempts by the Republican federal government to create new nuclear power plants around the country, you understand why another nuclear corporation in New Mexico called Urenco, located near Eunice close to both Carlsbad and Hobbs, wants to expand its production of enriched uranium for reactors. Urenco is currently the nation’s only uranium enrichment facility producing the kind of uranium isotope used to boil water and create steam at a nuclear power plant. Other companies like Centrus Energy and Orano USA, are thought to be gearing up to meet the increased demand for enriched uranium in the years ahead, both commercially and militarily.

All this could well make mining uranium in New Mexico immensely profitable again. There’s a strong chance we’ll see increased uranium mining and processing west of Albuquerque in the Grants Mineral Belt, as well in Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. One could write a book about the dangers of uranium mining and the billions of taxpayer dollars already paid to miners and downwinders as compensation for their uranium-mining related illnesses, including lung cancer and many other respiratory, digestive and reproductive diseases. Thousands of miners and their family members, many from indigenous communities, have been sickened by inhaling or ingesting uranium and its radioactive byproducts. They are still at risk from the more than 1,100 abandoned uranium mines in northwest New Mexico, left over from our last uranium mining boom that ended in the early 1980s.

I would think if anything could focus New Mexican’s attention away from the distractions of the terror circus endangering the political mental health of the nation, it’s the Republican focus on reinvigorating the nuclear industrial complex in America, especially given the party’s notorious proclivity to lie, cheat, obfuscate, deny, fabricate and scam.

In New Mexico, it makes sense to start giving more and more donations to local news and activist organizations that watchdog and oppose the irresponsible, anything-goes, to-hell-with-public-health approach the Republicans and their rabid right think tanks are sure to take in rebuilding a taxpayer-supported nuclear industry on the rubble of the old federal regulatory establishment.

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