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July 8, 2002
Tariq Ali
How the
Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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July
8, 2002
Yucca Mountain Bound
When You
Hear That Whistle Blowin', Pray Those Boxcars Ain't a-Glowin
by Rick Mercier
I thought I really have to care about the plan
to stash our country's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. I mean,
the place is all the way in Nevada, which might as well be Mars
as far as most of us here in Virginia are concerned.
Then I found out some of the North Anna
nuclear power plant's waste would be passing through downtown
Fredericksburg, a half-mile from where I work and less than a
mile from where I live.
Suddenly, Yucca Mountain became a hot
issue for me.
And it should be for lots of other people,
too, because if the Bush administration's proposal for the Nevada
site is approved by the Senate (a vote is expected this week),
tens of millions of Americans_including nearly 600,000 Virginians_will
be in my shoes: They'll be living or working within a mile of
a possible nuclear-waste transport route. (To find out whether
you live or work near a proposed route, visit <www.mapscience.org>.)
Oddly enough, the government hasn't demonstrated
much concern over how to ship the radioactive waste to a remote
part of Nevada. "What I find most shocking about the Yucca
Mountain project is that [the Department of Energy] has no plan
to transport spent nuclear fuel to its proposed repository,"
Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety
Board, testified in Congress on May 23.
In fact, the Department of Energy is
at least a year away from coming up with any detailed plan on
how the waste shipments will get to Yucca Mountain, or how population
centers along the routes might be affected, The Associated Press
reports.
The Navy and a handful of utilities currently
ship about 60 loads of highly radioactive waste across short
distances each year, according to the AP.
But those shipments_dubbed "mobile
Chernobyls" by critics of the Yucca Mountain project_will
climb dramatically under the Bush plan. According to the Environmental
Working Group, there would be 619 radioactive shipments through
Virginia alone over the 38-year life span of the project if the
waste is moved mostly by rail, and more than 7,000 shipments
if the waste is shipped mostly by truck.
Since dozens of nuclear power plants
cannot ship directly by rail, a combination truck-rail solution
would be likely (with some barge shipments thrown in for good
measure). The upshot would be tens of thousands of nuke shipments
across our country in the coming decades.
(Fun fact: The U.S. Public Interest Research
Group reports that folks stuck in a traffic jam for an hour next
to a nuke-transporting truck would receive a radiation dose that's
the equivalent of getting a chest X-ray_something generally not
advised for children and pregnant women.)
Shipping distances also would be far
greater than they are now, since most of the waste would have
to be sent from east of the Mississippi to the Nevada site. U.S.
PIRG estimates that the average shipping distance would be over
2,000 miles.
DOE has expressed full confidence in
the shipment casks designed to carry the waste, but tests by
the government's Sandia National Laboratory have concluded that
the containers could be penetrated by a missile or other high-energy
weapon. And DOE has admitted that last year's rail-tunnel fire
in Baltimore was severe enough to have caused the release of
radioactive material had one of the nuclear-waste casks been
involved.
There are also conflicting assessments
of the number of people who would die if one of those casks did
leak. DOE's worst-case scenario predicts 48 radiation-related
deaths in a terrorist incident and five such deaths in a serious
truck accident. But the Environmental Working Group cites experts
who estimate thousands of deaths over time if a radiation release
occurred in an urban area.
Yucca Mountain proponents argue we'd
enjoy greatly increased security from having our nuclear waste
stored in a central facility. But after the shipments to Yucca
Mountain end, in 2048, there still will be nearly the same amount
of nuclear waste at power plants as there is today, the Environmental
Working Group says. Virginia, for example, now has 1,732 metric
tons of nuclear waste; that figure would remain at 1,266 metric
tons after Yucca Mountain is filled.
Since Sept. 11, the authorities have
been assuring us that our nuclear waste presently is stored in
safe, secure sites. If that's the case, why is the Bush administration
in such a rush to force the Yucca Mountain plan through Congress,
especially when they haven't ironed out the transportation details?
Hall, the former NTSB chief, believes "they're trying to
slip this through before [the transportation questions] are focused
on by the American people."
He might be right. In any event, there
are too many unanswered questions about the Yucca Mountain project
for it to go forward at this time. The Senate must do the responsible
thing this week and shelve the plan until DOE has done all of
its homework.
Rick Mercier
is a columnist for The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg.
He can be reached at rmercier@freelancestar.com
Today's
Features
Tariq Ali
How the
Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
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