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Re: "Political wranglings over WIPP"
Apparently, the only way you folks can win an argument is to attack the integrity of
anyone who dares to disagree with you.
I'm sure we'll all feel a lot safer when DOE has enough weapons to kill everyone
30,000 times.
The opinions expressed are strictly mine.
It's not about dose, it's about trust.
Curies forever.
Bill Lipton
liptonw@dteenergy.com
Steven Dapra wrote:
> October 20
>
> I have read and re-read the review of Chuck McCutcheon's book in Nuclear
> News (NN). I have also lived in New Mexico for about 20 years (most of
> them in Albuquerque), and have watched the disputes swirling around WIPP.
> Sometimes I watched closely, sometimes from a distance. I have not read
> McCutcheon's book.
>
> According to the NN reviewer, "The book empirically proves that public
> opposition to a nuclear repository stems from lack of trust toward the
> government and the perceived risk."
>
> If McCutcheon's book proves anything it proves that a small,
> well-organized, tenacious, and noisy band of fanatics can spend over 20
> years trying to derail a useful, important, and enormously expensive
> Federal project. I don't have any polls on WIPP handy, but would guess
> that "the public" - the general mass of New Mexico residents - never cared
> much either way about WIPP. The "public opposition" invoked by the
> reviewer came from that small band of anti-nuclear fanatics who also happen
> to occupy the left-hand end of the political spectrum. Their location on
> the spectrum explains their entire reason for opposing WIPP.
>
> Among other things, the anti-WIPP elements are anti-defense. WIPP's
> purpose was to store wastes from bomb production. If the anti-WIPPers
> could have derailed WIPP there would have been no place to store bomb
> production wastes and if there were no place to store these wastes sooner
> or later bomb production would have to be shut down.
>
> In 1991 a leading anti-WIPP partisan wrote an article for a local weekly
> tabloid wherein he claimed that 70 percent of the waste slated for WIPP
> 'didn't exist yet.' He went on to write: "That 70 percent is waste that
> will be generated when DOE resumes the production of nuclear bombs.
> Apparently, even with their present ability to destroy the human race
> 20,000 times over, and the collapse of the Cold War, DOE still does not
> feel safe. So the opening of WIPP would not solve the nuclear waste
> problem, because it will act as a green light for the Pentagon to resume
> nuclear weapons production on a major scale, at a time that we desperately
> need economic re-building, not more weapons of destruction."
>
> Let's overlook the veracity of the 70 percent claim, and the 20,000 times
> over claim. Isn't it perfectly obvious that this piece of opposition to
> WIPP is coming from someone who is motivated by politics, and not by any
> real or even alleged business about "trust toward the government," or by
> any interests in "perceived risk"?
>
> Trust and risk are only a stalking horse that a bunch of left wing
> extremists are hiding behind to advance - in this case - their anti-defense
> agenda.
>
> Steven Dapra
> sjd@swcp.com
>
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