by Cheryl Rofer
That’s been an environmental cry for some time, but now we’re also hearing it with regard to the Guantánamo detainees.
I’ve been reminded of it in several articles and opinion pieces on environmental issues lately, and it’s those I’ll deal with in this post, leaving the Guantánamo uproar to others, who are dealing with it quite competently.
There are good reasons for not wanting certain kinds of things in one’s backyard. The hurried uranium-mining for the Cold War buildup of nuclear weapons left some messes behind. Tajikistan currently gets Paul Goble’s spotlight, but there are others across the old Soviet Union: Ukraine and Uzbekistan, to name two more. It’s one of those cosmic oddities that Russia doesn’t have much in the way of uranium reserves, and it’s one of those political difficulties that the Soviet Union was less careful than they might have been, particularly when the mining was outside of Mother Russia, leading to some of the grievances that eventually tore the Union apart.
The United States did these things hurriedly, too, although many of them have been cleaned up. Some of the tailings remain, particularly on Indian land.
We’re cleaning up some of those other Cold War things that are in some backyards, but we need to get smarter on who’s doing the work for us. The defense contractors magically became expert in environmental cleanups back in the 1980s, when defense budgets were coming down and environmental cleanup budgets were going up. We’re still dealing with that mess, too.
Harry Reid doesn’t want the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in his backyard. The same Harry Reid who doesn’t want Guantánamo detainees in his backyard, which apparently includes the entire United States. Yucca Mountain has been studied for more than two decades now. It’s not voodoo science, as Reid claims, but the real stuff.
Clearly Reid is responding to his constituents, who don’t want nuclear waste or detainees in their backyard. Reid is pushing renewable energy on his website and doesn’t say anything about how nuclear might contribute to the nation’s future energy needs. He does say, however, that some solution must be found to storing nuclear waste. Keep it at the reactors, he says, in those other backyards.
Steven Walt asks a good question about the detainees, which I would shape just a little differently: Are Americans overentitled? Entitled to have national security and not deal with the consequences? Entitled to have electricity and not deal with the carbon dioxide or spent fuel it produces? This has been the way politics has been conducted for a couple of decades now: anything you want, no consequences, vote for me. And the American people have been foolish enough to buy that. So perhaps Harry Reid is just the sort of politician we deserve. But that isn’t going to solve the problems.