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Why WIPP Is the Wrong Solution
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15274 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1989 |
3,019 Words |
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Daniel Gibson
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Just over four decades ago the world's first atom bomb was detonated in the southern deserts of New Mexico in a region called the Jornado del Muerto (Journey of Death). Since that time, the United States has been continually designing and manufacturing nuclear weapons at a string of bomb factories across the nation. Now, the chicken New Mexico let fly may be coming home to roost.
Since 1981, the Department of Energy (DOE) has been constructing an underground facility in New Mexico designed to serve as the disposal site for the extremely long-lived and lethal waste by-products of nuclear weapons production. The complex of surface buildings and miles of underground shafts, tunnels, and waste disposal rooms is knows as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
The wastes slated for WIPP are currently being held at DOE facilities scattered across the nation from Hanford, Washington, to Savannah River, South Carolina. Over the past year, Congress and the American public have discovered that these facilities have massively contaminated local air, water, and soils with radioactive and hazardous substances.
At facilities like the Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver, local cancer rates greatly exceed regional averages. At the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), radioactive contamination has penetrated the Snake River aquifer, central to the State's agriculture and urban drinking water supplies. A congressional watchdog entity, the General Accounting Office, estimates it will cost $100-200 billion to clean up these sites--if it can be done at all.
Clearly, radioactive wastes created by DOE bomb production pose an extreme hazard to the nation's security. It is as if we have exploded a "slow" nuclear bomb in our very midst. Reviewing the situation, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) notes, "Those who would choose to poison our own people in order to make nuclear weapons should be asked what the weapons are supposed to protect us from."
A solution to eliminating these wastes is essential. DOE says the solution is WIPP. However, the project's critics say it is not the solution and that it in fact poses immense dangers to the populace of New Mexico, as well as to millions of Americans living along the proposed highway shipping routes to WIPP and those "downstream" of the facility.
WIPP is plagued by a host of critical problems, ranging from flaws in the site and the proposed transportation program to the project's political acceptability and regulatory snafus. In spite of these factors, DOE is pressing ahead with the project and says it will open in the fall of 1989.
WIPP's reception
Over the past year, New Mexicans have grown increasingly worried about WIPP. All the shipping routes for the wastes converge here, and the general road improvements and bypasses around cities like Santa Fe and Roswell promised by DOE have not been completed. Water, a precious commodity in the Southwest, is thought to be threatened by potential radionuclide releases from the facility.
A survey conducted by the Albuquerque Journal in the fall of 1988 found that
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