Last week the Potato Commission sent a box of potatoes to the House
and Senate for each of us. A Technical training center from Cassia
County gave us a beautiful laser- and
router-carved wooden paper weight with our names carved into the side
and an Idaho Quarter set in the top. At a lunch for the anniversary of
the Idaho National Lab we were given a thumb drive and sticky note
holder along with a mini nuclear waste barrel that functions as a
squishy stress reliever/forearm exerciser.
We
get gifts as legislators. I usually feel funny enough about them or the
expectation of a promise or vote that I give them away to interns or
statehouse staff. We did vote last week to pass a memorial commending
the Idaho National Lab on its anniversary. I voted for it because it
seemed to reflect the lab in a genuine rather than a wishful way. It
was a good memorial. I'd vote for it even if I'd not been offered the
nuclear waste barrel/stress reliever/forearm exerciser gift.
The
anniversary lunch where we got the Lab's gifts was a blur of slides and
very brief admirals and contractors speaking in front of a big back
curtain. Normally these folks at the INL focus public presentations on
the great promise of Nuclear Power and their mission to build the next
generation of nuclear power plants. Anymore they seem to go to great
lengths to avoid talking about all the radioactive waste buried and
stored out there in the desert of South Eastern Idaho.
But at
lunch, in celebrating that nuclear reactor technology was first tested
and developed here in Idaho, celebrating our role in nuclear weapons
production and nuclear waste storage, the lab did focus on waste and on
the thousands of people who have labored for decades under often
dangerous conditions to try and clean up what is one of the largest
nuclear waste dumps in the nation.
I've met many people who
worked out there at "the site" over the years. Most recently a fire
fighter who I worry about after having heard what he has breathed and
how he no longer fears that odd feeling of heat and gamma rays
radiating off of spent fuel and high level waste.
I will be a
big proponent of nuclear power when we do finally solve the issue of
waste. We will need to figure out how to neutralize it, not just
recycle part of it. We can't keep leaving the most highly radioactive
remains to burn somewhere in a mountain or building or pool of water
for decades, centuries or millennia. I hope our government continues to
invest money in solving the puzzle of how to render radioactive
materials harmless. I even hope our lab gets that job and does it well.
But
to talk of building new nuclear power plants before that task is done
is beyond my comprehension. To talk about how this energy is clean or
carbon free when in truth it is mined, refined, processed, transported,
reprocessed, stored, cooled, monitored, repackaged and labored-over
using decades of fossil fuels, that makes no sense. We still have no
idea what to do besides piling more radioactive waste next to every
nuclear power plant we build in every city or town from New York to
California. To revive the industry means billion in profits for a few
and a gift of consequences for the rest of us.
Nuclear waste is a
gift our state still keeps getting. Most Idahoans don't know it but the
nuclear navy's nuclear submarines still send all their radioactive
"spent fuel" waste here to Idaho. Dangerous materials so radioactively
hot that they are literally deadly to behold. Three Mile Island has
waste buried out there in the soil over our aquifer. Decades of taking
other state's nuclear weapons waste have left the soil so hot in places
that even now it catches on fire sometimes. Workers in big tents use
robots and cranes to dig it up out of the soil and put it in barrels to
become New Mexico's problem.
If we want more gifts, we will
believe the industry when they promise us it is a clean and safe form
of energy now. They say they have solved the issue of the waste by
recycling part of it. But ask them where it all goes. All of it. Ask
what precisely we are left with afterward and is this something Idaho
wants or is it something we're hoping someday to pass guiltily on to
some other state or community with our own hollow promises and wishful
thinking.
That's another gift I will decline. I will leave that
one, like I left the mini squishy stress reliever/nuclear waste barrel
on the INL luncheon table.