"Nukes Mess With Texas" by Carl Pope

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Carl Pope is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club:

"Two days ago, a district court judge upheld the results of a vote six months ago in Andrews County, Texas, about whether to use $75 million dollars in taxpayer bond receipts to construct a low-level nuclear waste dump here. The vote was agonizingly close: 642-639. There were ballot irregularities, but the judge chose to overlook them. But what's really shocking about this story is not this latest step, but the whole rotten, corrupt history of the project from its inception -- and the evidence it presents that the nuclear industry has learned nothing from its sordid past. Nuclear power is far too dangerous (and, arguably, far too important) to be left in the hands of its current custodians -- folks like Harold Simmons, the backer of the Andrews County Nuclear Waste facility to be operated by his company, Waste Control Specialists.

Simmons, a Dallas billionaire, was most prominent recently as the financier of television ads attacking the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama for his alleged connections to former radical William Ayers. Simmons, however, is also a major direct funder of political candidates, including $500,000 to Texas Governor Rick Perry. So it is perhaps not surprising that the state's environmental commissioners, appointed by Perry, gave Simmons the permits he sought to allow his waste site to handle much more dangerous radioactive materials than it was designed for."

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Simmons wants to make Texas the dumping ground for as much of America's nuclear waste as he can. The site he has chosen sits on top of America's biggest and agriculturally most critical aquifer, the Ogallala. The site has not been properly analyzed for whether or not it can safely store any kind of radioactive waste, much less the huge volumes of enormously toxic stuff Simmons wants to import. An interoffice memorandum submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in August 2007 concludes that "Groundwater is likely to intrude into the proposed disposal units ... the Applicant has failed to use numerical modeling to predict the future location of one water table that is expected to intrude into radioactive waste .... the Applicant has not demonstrated that the site is suitable for near surface disposal of radioactive waste." But Glenn Shankle, the executive director of the Commission, overruled his technical staff.

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This story only gets worse. This is the first time I've heard anything about this. Big sigh...

more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/nukes-mess-with-texas_b_314344.html

[sonias]

1. Yeah this is bad

The bond vote was financed by Simmons and Waste Control Specialists - literally they paid the county to conduct the election. You know so it would cost them any money to give them tax payer bond money to build this project. It was totally crazy. The bond proposal won by 6 votes.


Sonia

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2. The Ogallala Aquifer provides critical water to 8 states.

It is very shallow in some areas, as little as only 2 feet below the surface: