The Ethics of Nuclear-Waste Disposal

Regarding the editorial "Energy and Nuclear Waste," Oct. 23: The Monitor seems to be trying very hard to take a balanced viewpoint on this issue. Unfortunately, being balanced does nothing more than legitimize an unethical position.

It would be unethical and illegal for me to run a dynamite factory in the middle of a residential neighborhood, regardless of how safely I operated the facility. Why then is it legal for a power company to do something that could poison several thousand neighborhoods? The reason that radioactive waste is being stored on a temporary basis and has been building up for the last 25 years at the plant site is that there is no place to put it. There is no such thing as an acceptable burial site for nuclear was te.

Regarding the proposed burial sites the editorial states: "... it seems reasonable to allow further tests in which small amounts of carefully packaged radioactive waste would be placed in these repositories." It sounds reasonable, but it isn't. The Yucca Mountain region in Nevada, which our government wants so badly to use as a nuclear-waste dump, rightfully belongs to the Shoshone people. They were forced off their homeland, even jailed for resisting their removal, so that we could blow up atomic bombs and dump nuclear waste on the land. These actions are outrageous, and by failing to condemn them we are allowing them to continue. Let's stop trying to be "reasonable" with immoral actions, and let's expose them for what they are. Joel Pierce, Monarch Beach, Calif.

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