Pick Up Your Socks

The Plutonium Facility at Los Alamos, with the Rio Grande valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the background. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Women may still be picking up men’s socks as we have been doing for generations; I don’t know not being exposed to that dubious opportunity but the Federal government is having the same difficulty picking up its socks, in this case, the toxic waste left here in New Mexico and elsewhere as the result of sixty years of nuclear weapons building.

Nobody knows what to do with these tons of dirty socks, least of all the government that is responsible for solving the massive problem it created. Now the U.S. Department of Energy is making the case that adding a layer or two of dirt on top of canyons full of unlined receptacles—Barrels? Buckets?—of this stuff will fix the problems that come from toxic leaks into our groundwater.

That’s a relatively cheap way to do it but will be ineffectual; rain, animals digging, and seismic shifting would eventually destroy the dirt lid and expose the noxious stew.

Our state Environmental Department has responded that the only satisfactory solution is to excavate these pits and haul the stuff—somewhere. There is no permanent site in this country for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste; no one wants it anywhere near where there is life, human, animal or vegetable. But of course the Feds want to do this in the cheapest way possible, equivalent to throwing a blanket over the socks and hoping everybody will forget what’s underneath. Meanwhile plans to double the production of nuclear pits or triggers goes on at enormous price, generating more waste for which there is no solution.

In New Mexico Los Alamos Nuclear Archbishop Wester