Plutonium
In regards to the State of Nevada politics concerning the DOEs shipment of Plutonium to Nevada. Why does the Nevada political representation continue to ignore that 85 percent of the state land mass is desert owned by the federal government, e.g. all U.S. Citizens? Why, for strategic reasons and “national security” of AMERICA. Nevada has had a long history of this service to our country.
Gov. Steve Sisolak said he is “beyond outraged by this completely unacceptable deception.” Governor, the state’s opposition to this AND its opposition to Yucca Mountain are based on “your” politics, rather than the actual science & engineering conducted by the DOE. NONE of the Nevada representatives have toured the Idaho National Laboratory for an education about our nation’s nuclear technology. The best security has always been, unannounced, unmarked movement. Many touring concerts employ such tactics. E.g. you and the other representative comments are statements based on opinion rather than research. Ms. Titus, if you and Ms. Rosen want to deem this and the Yucca Mountain program unethical, you should legally recognize the facts. The Obama Administration which halted the Yucca program obstructed congressional law, and the Obama stoppage of Yucca was overruled by the courts, facts.
All occasions of Nevada’s legal challenges to the “Yucca Mountain Law” have been overturned by the courts. The Yucca program was never developed to serve Nevada politics. It was developed to serve all of America and the Nevada public. The truth is the citizens have been misled for over 35 years about its science and engineering stability.
Some 80 percent of the science & engineering community accept the Yucca facility as designed is a safe long-term sustainable facility. Most also believe that reprocessing technology eventually will resolve 96 percent of the Spent Nuclear Fuel. Will there ever be a chance that Nevada’s political representatives might be educated about nuclear technology?
Gary Duarte
Sparks
Susan Orr and I testified at a 1974 Salt Lake City hearing on the Atomic Energy Commission (now Department of Energy) environmental impact statement about storage of nuclear wastes in Nevada. We learned not only U.S. wastes but also wastes from every country which had received nuclear fission reactors from the U.S. would be our responsibility, plus, reactors must be decommissioned (after 30-35 years), and also would need storage for 240,000 years (later revised to “only 10,000 years”). The U.S.A. soon will be only 243 years old.
Nevada, mostly federally owned, was “barren & unpopulated” and the “test site” was “contaminated by above and below-ground atomic bomb tests.” Not much science needed to decide just to stick the stuff underground. A dog burying a bone could put more deep thought into his/her actions.
Wastes were stored mostly in granite on the East coast. Nevada earthquake fault tremors from the test site were felt in Idaho. Should canisters or steel tunnel rupture, liquid waste could leach through porous “tuff” and sandy soil to the Amargosa River underground to reach populated communities like Pahrump. No need to add “waste” flavors to their winery.
We co-founded Citizen Alert and traveled Nevada to share what we had learned. At one point, I said “Nevada is not a wasteland” and bumper stickers with that slogan were made by Marla Painter.
Nevada is a beautiful, subtle state. She has often been abused by those who dug holes to take her treasures, and she has long (legally) accepted money from those who wanted to put their stuff in her orifices.
Luckily, state leaders have for five decades protected her (and us), until the sneak attack last October of a half metric ton of plutonium forced upon her with rapacious disregard for our beloved state’s “freedom of speech” to say “No, thank you.”
Heck fire and boy howdy, talk about “inappropriate behavior.” No hearings held, no leaders informed, no citizens alerted—such secret lawless actions can destroy a democratic republic. To say the crime had to be “secret” for our “security” reveals a cavalier disregard for truth.
From a caring United States of America citizen,
K. Hale
Reno