Nuclear Waste

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

Below is an AP story. Here is the opposition they forgot to mention.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 (AP) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized a license on Friday for a private company to build a nuclear waste storage plant on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian
Reservation in Utah, rejecting the state's argument that the site was too dangerous.

“I believe sound science, not politics, must prevail in the designation of any high-level nuclear waste repository. As President, I would not sign legislation that would send nuclear waste to any proposed site unless it’s been deemed scientifically safe.” --Candidate Bush on the Campaign Trail, 2000.

Nevada is a Red State that voted again in 2004 for Bush, even after he lied to them about Yucca Mtn? And now this -- charges that government scientists deliberately faked data???

E-mails suggest efforts aimed at clinching nuclear waste project

(AP)  E-mails by several government scientists on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project suggest workers were planning to fabricate records and manipulate results to ensure outcomes that would help the project move forward.