Comment:
The push to build a new Rocky Flats plant somewhere to begin to stockpile new pits for new weapon types originated with the hard right wing and Obama’s promises to them, but has been enthusiastically taken up by Udall, Heinrich (a right-wing fellow as regards all things military and nuclear), and the other New Mexico Democrats in Congress, for greed’s sake.
It’s become hard to tell where the nuclear labs end and the delegation begins. Although there is no evidence that this mission would help the New Mexico economy (and 70 years of evidence to the contrary), serving the labs does help these politicians personally, and that’s the main motive here. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t lose face with senate peers. Don’t do anything creative. Above all support the military and big contractors, because they’re powerful. No telling what they can do. That’s our guys.
The world, and the US in the world, face an existential climate and resource crisis requiring (and soon, causing) very rapid changes in our economic and social life. The subtropics — in our case the Chihuahan desert — march north at an average rate of about 1 degree of latitude per decade, or about 100 ft per day, with lazy meanders in the circumpolar vortex greatly increasing the probability of periodic severe drought within an overall drift toward desertification. The US inexorably slips from its position of global hegemony toward a new multipolar world. Half or more of US citizens live precariously from paycheck to paycheck. The government, corporations, and households add more and more debt, shifting problems wherever possible onto the children. Very dangerous men and women have taken over our government.
Our senators, trailing our thoughtless congresspersons behind them, meanwhile dream of plutonium pits. Perhaps it will help, they apparently think, to make the Santa Fe area into the nation’s industrial plutonium processing center. That is just so swell of them. They don’t question the need to make pits — in fact they are among the loudest voices in the chorus for making more pits, beyond the 23,000 we have.
I hate to be so rough on the delegation, but they really do have the power to make a very positive difference for our country, and LANL, and New Mexico, on this particular issue. Udall needs to speak up against industrial pit production, anywhere. He is to the right of his predecessors on the matter of industrializing LANL’s plutonium R&D, and is going against numerous local resolutions as well.
More pernicious still, getting industrial pit production for New Mexico, and ensuring support for nuclear weapons in general, may well explain how a measure to establish a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel has been a feature of legislation reported from Mr. Udall’s appropriations subcommmittee for six years running.