March 14th, 2007
Dear Readers,
If you don't know what GNEP stands for, it's simple: Nuclear waste reprocessing in America. For private profit. For public shame. And perfectly legal, for the first time in 30 years.
The full name is Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. It will cost -- gulp -- hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to start up, but Bush wants to do it anyway.
What makes it GLOBAL is that America will become the nuclear sewage pit of the planet, taking highly-toxic, highly-radioactive, extremely-difficult-to-handle nuclear waste from rogue and friendly countries alike -- anyone we can bargain with -- and then we will enrich it. Pull out what we like, and pile up (or disperse to the winds and waters) what we don't.
In other words, we'll make nuclear bombs with it. We'll make nuclear reactor fuel with it.
And we'll make lots of other things, too. We'll make highly toxic radioactive power sources for outer space use, including "batteries" for spy satellites and for "civilian" deep-space probes (which will, in fact, just be a cover program for the spy satellite's radioactive batteries program).
We'll make undersea listening devices for enemy harbors with the nuclear waste, too.
We'll make Depleted Uranium bullets, shells, bombs and missiles with it. We'll make "bunker busters" with it.
We'll even make children's braces -- yep! I'm not kidding! Old steel from nuclear reactors can be sold as "scrap" to regular metal recycling facilities, even though it is radioactive and thus, carcinogenic. The GNEP facility will, itself, become radioactive as it is used. All its tools, everything, will get the "shine" -- and then, later, it will all be sold as regular scrap, except for a small portion which is so radioactive it will have to be reprocessed again . . . and again . . . and again . . .
Except that "reprocessing" is dirty. It leaks, it contaminates, it has accidents, including transportation accidents across the great oceans. The Nuclear Mafia wants to call reprocessing (the traditional term) "recycling" because it sounds nicer, but it's not like any "green" recycling you've ever heard of. It's dirty from start to finish.
President Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing 30 years ago because even he, a nuclear submariner and advocate of commercial reactors, could not accept the false logic which promoters of the process presented. Nothing's changed -- it's STILL a bad idea. (Despite banning reprocessing, Jimmy Carter was a classic closet pro-nuker: For example, he did NOT shut down the nuclear power industry, as he could have and should have, after Three Mile Island. Instead, he went and toured TMI. Earlier, while campaigning for office, he described nuclear power as being "a last resort," but as soon as he got into office, he declared that America "was down to its last resorts" and, of course, supported nuclear power.)
GNEP represents the most reprehensible things about nuclear power: Waste, proliferation, fortunes being made by private companies whose business is comfortably (for them) kept secret from the pubic, supposedly due to "terrorism" concerns. The public will not be informed about spills, leaks, fires, explosions, contaminated workers, or anything else that goes on inside the reprocessing facility, once it's been approved and the wall around the work site is put up.
They'll just die from cancers, leukemia, birth defects, and other ailments, especially downwind in the prevailing direction, but winds blow in every direction almost everywhere, over time, so everyone around the plant (and around the planet) will be poisoned, day and night, for the poison will be in their air and their water, on their land and in their crops, and in anything that eats their crops.
Radioactive poisons are undetectable by any human sense organ, except in doses so large that death is virtually certain and relatively quick. In smaller quantities, expensive and carefully calibrated equipment is needed to know for sure where the tritium, cesium, strontium, and other radioactive particles have gone.
The GNEP facility, wherever it is built, will spew radioactive waste 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and an extra day on leap year. Like all nuclear facilities IT COULD NOT OPERATE any other way! Otherwise, the waste residue would build up inside the facility to the point where a worker's dose would become illegally high too soon, and the worker would have to be released so that, years later, his or her cancer can be more easily blamed on anything but the GNEP facility.
So instead, like all commercial nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities, GNEP will poison the environment steadily, and hope the winds will disperse the waste enough so that no epidemiologist could reconstruct the trail, no court could prove with absolute certainty where the cancers came from.
GNEP stands for death and suffering. A Global Network of Evil People.
Tell the Department of Energy (DOE, or "Death Of the Earth squad") not to allow reprocessing in America!
Stop GNEP!!
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA