Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Texas Is Becoming A Nuclear Waste Dump

Texas already accepts low-level nuclear waste, and now it may also start storing spent nuclear fuel:

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/could-texas-become-home-to-highly-radioactive-wast/ndB5b/


Many years ago, I worked at a DOE facility in South Carolina that was built to process nuclear waste. The waste was going to be put into metal-clad glass logs and stored in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. A repository was built at great expense in Yucca Mountain, but it's not going to be used. Why? Fear that the contamination would leak out.


Why then would Texas accept similar waste? For the money?


In the same vicinity out in West Texas and across the border in New Mexico are a nuclear waste dump, a nuclear fuel enrichment facility, and a radioactive isotope extraction facility. Once the spent nuclear fuel facility is built, the area will soon become a one-stop dump-anything-you-have-enterprise. The fact that such facilities threaten the Ogallala Aquifer apparently no longer matters, if it ever did.


And why should it, in a state which has already put the riches of fracking and refining tar sands oil above the importance of protecting our air and water resources? There is enough toxic shit above ground and underground in Texas that if it escaped it could kill everything on the planet.


And no storage facility ever built is going to last forever. Some day all that crap is going to leak out. You can count on it.

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