I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
U.S. Rep. Harry Teague, D-N.M., announced in a press release today that $172 million in stimulus money will be spent at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, known as WIPP, in southern New Mexico near Carlsbad.
“The Recovery funding that will go to WIPP will create hundreds of jobs in southeastern New Mexico and help jumpstart the economy in a responsible way,” said Teague. “The work that WIPP does to prepare and store nuclear waste is a unique and vital asset to our nation.”
WIPP is federal government’s only nuclear waste repository, and it recently reached its 10-year anniversary.
But John Fleck had an interesting blog post in the Albuquerque Journal Monday about a group questioning whether the money should be spent at WIPP, which is in Teague’s 2nd Congressional District, or at Los Alamos National Labs, which is in the 3rd Congressional District.
LANL will receive $212 million in recovery funds according to the Department of Energy.
“There are needs at Los Alamos that are not being met,” said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque non-profit that monitors federal nuclear cleanup work.
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Hancock and others argue that the WIPP spending, including money for new containers to ship radioactive waste, could not be spent quickly enough to meet the program’s economic stimulus goal.
The Teague statement notes that the money would not just be for containers. It would also include “facility modifications to take in different sized and shaped containers of waste.”
So the question becomes: What will be more stimulating to the economy and better for New Mexico? Cleaning up the nuclear waste at LANL or providing more nuclear containers to house nuclear waste at WIPP?
