NH #396: New Mexico Radioactive Waste Showdown: Don Hancock on WIPP and Proposed "Interim" Storage

New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad

This Week’s Featured Interview:

• New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) radioactive waste problems examined in Libbe HaLevy’s interview with Don Hancock, Executive Director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, a nuclear watchdog group headquartered in Albuquerque.  The group  focuses on the goings-on at WIPP, this country’s only deep geological repository for low level nuclear waste.  He gives us an update on conditions at WIPP since its 2014 accidents closed it down, along with the intense political wrangling going on right now about changing  regulations to allow WIPP to take high level waste it’s not designed to handle. We also go into the battle raging right now over the threat of the world’s largest radioactive waste dump being situated in New Mexico and/or New Mexico-adjacent in West Texas.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

If you’re in a nuclear submarine and high enough in the water to be able to look out the periscope, don’t you think you should be able to notice that you’re on a crash course towards a 1,300 person/660 vehicle ferry boat?

Activist Info Links:

• New Film on Sister Megan Rice and the Plowshares movement:  The Nuns, the Priests, and the Bombs. 
• Five Reasons NOT to Invest in Nuclear by Bob Alvarez
• At Least 340,00 Americans Died from Radioactive Fallout Between 1951 and 1973
• When ALL of America’s New Nuclear WArhead Designs Will be Active — and How Much They’ll Cost

Yes, I Glow in the Dark!
One Mile from Three Mile Island
to Fukushima and Nuclear Hotseat
by Libbe HaLevy

Nuclear Hotseat host Libbe HaLevy’s book about having been one mile from the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.  Filled with personal narrative of having been ground zero at almost-Armageddon, stories from her career in show business, how Nuclear Hotseat came to be (and some of its more notable stories), and a guide to how to fight back against the nuclear industry.  Available now on Amazon.