Re: Anti-WIPP article lacks critical thinking

[Polly Parks <pparks@igc.apc.org>]

Susan, the problem is that nobody asked the fine citizens of these states
if they wanted this problem to begin with.  That is especially true for the
major DOE sites.  So they were sited in states that needed the federal
dollars and the politicians in those states (including my dear uncle in S.
Carolina) traded their state's poverty for hypothetical future risks.
Except now we know that it wasn't hypothetical and that was known back in
the 50s when those places went up.

In addition to the S. Carolina connection, I also grew up in Nevada and my
Grandmother had a farm next door to Umatilla and across the river from
Hanford.  Knowing from personal experience how the federal government has
shown its utter disregard for the health and safety of this nation's
citizens in order to perfect more perfect weapons of mass destruction, I
have little sympathy for the politicians and scientists who apologize in
hindsight while still refusing to address how to contain this mess.
Trucking nuclear waste to geologically unstable formations is not solving
the problem.  All those actions do is defer the problem -- hopefully beyond
the span of human kind.  Well, hope is not a method.

Having grown up in a state that was forced to sacrifice extensive tracts of
good territory and future water supplies to the nuclear weapons program --
and which is now having Yucca Mt. rammed down its throat, I don't take
kindly to the federal government asking license to ignore the future.  When
I was growing up, the Nevada test site was "out in the middle of f**king
nowhere."  It isn't today....and while I may be gray, I'm not so old.

The one thing I'm willing to give the federal government license to do, is
to "tax" the weapon program side of DoD/DOE to develop more efficient and
cost effective ways to locally contain the contamination that cannot be
remediated.  And once that task is done, then they can devote some
resources to figuring out how to reverse this process they have unleashed.
And if that means we have to defer development of some future weapons of
mass destruction.  So be it.

Polly Parks