Q: Why do activist believe that WIPP will not last long enough to take care of the TRU waste?

A: The proponent of WIPP would have you believe that the salt beds are so stable that nothing has disturbed for them for millions of years and nothing will disturb them for millions of years, but of course there's absolutely no documentation to support the fact the beds, the anhydrite layers that compose the site have not been drastically fractured just by the intrusion that was required to build the facility. And they've gone down and dug these shafts and made these disposal beds and dragged all kinds of heavy equipment around and um, vibrations and elevators and they have very much altered what at one time were unfractured anhydrite layers. So I think it's very unclear that those layers won't move around.

Q: OK. What about human intrusion in the future?

A: Because WIPP is located in an area that is rich natural resources, it has always attracted a great deal of mining, the potash industry is what was economically viable there in the past and oil and gas reserves are there. It seems very optimistic to think that no one will drill in to this land for 10's or 100's of

Q: They aren't saying that. They are saying it will be drilled into, but that not enough will escape to affect it.

A: Because the area is very rich in natural resources and potash and oil and gas, it seems very clear that as time goes by, people will drill into the site and I, it seems impossible to estimate how many people will drill into the site or what will be the result of that drilling.

Q: Kind of a vague answer. They state that there would be no effects on people even if the entire amount of radiation that would be buried ended up released.

A: Since the area is so rich in natural resources, since it has potash and oil and gas reserves and it seems very clear that it will be drill into in the future as it has been ever since people lived in the area, because there's an important aquifer that lies directly disposal site that feeds into the Pecos River and ultimately the Rio Grande, it just does not make sense to assume that that human intrusion will not release toxic chemical and radioactive components into the biosphere.

Q: DoE claims that the aquifer is not potable water and therefore is not of concern.

A: The aquifer has recharge rates that have never been fully characterized. Nobody knows how quickly or slowly the water moves. Because of the karst formations each hole that they have drilled has revealed a different movement rate on the water. And people all over the world recognize that underground is part of the biosphere. That our groundwater and the filtration methods by which it reaches our environment haven't clearly characterized. Haven't been understood. It is something they simply can't say one way or the other this will be safe or this will not be safe.

Q: Minimizing the water problems with in the site in terms of salt brine and hydrophilic qualities.

A: Salt is a hydrophilic disposal medium. Unlike stone which repels moisture when the temperature goes up. If the temperature rises in salt it attracts water to the site. And because the radioactive waste has it's own thermal activity and the decomposing organic elements and chemical interactions that will be occurring in the waste will also create heat. As more moisture is attracted to the site, the decomposition of the barrels and the waste will accelerate, driving up the temperature even faster, drawing more water to the site even faster, and creating a vicious cycle.

Q: Have you been to the WIPP site and have you seen water there?

A: I have toured the WIPP site. It is a very impressive mine. I don't know that it makes a good disposal facility. There's an awful lot of amazing equipment down there and it's quite an engineering miracle. I have toured the site. I did see the big fans blowing to dry out the spots where the moisture is seeping in through the walls of the disposal rooms. I think water is being attracted to the site by the activity that is going on there right now and I think water will continue to be attracted to the site.

Q: What are the consequences of not raising and not answering questions now? What are the consequences of minimizing these problems at WIPP?

A: DoE has a long history of not asking itself the tough questions before it's commences operations. It behaves sort of like a toddler, it goes from one project to the next, starting things up and leaving the mess for someone else to worry about and that is why each DoE facility, each generator site where nuclear weapons work has been done around the country is so badly contaminated. I think that WIPP would be chance for them to trot out and show us the new DoE that supposedly is going to think of the problems first and address them first and yet by all indications they are continuing on in the same vein of starting up a project and letting the chips fall and, you know, letting someone else deal with the mess later.

Q: Will WIPP ever be able to be cleaned up?

A: One of the worst parts of the design of WIPP is that the mess will be absolutely irretrievable. The facility is designed to collapse. Once they decommission the above ground buildings and they turn off lights and plug and seal the shafts and leave the site there is no force of nature, human or otherwise that is going to be able to get down there underground and clean up the mess. It's very much like sweeping something under the rug.

Q: What does WIPP do for cleanup at generator sites?

A: DoE would have us believe that WIPP cleans up their mess all around the country. And the sad truth of the matter is that if you have 20 really badly contaminated DoE facilities nation wide, you open WIPP you'll have 21. There is not one site that will be cleaned up by WIPP. At each site as WIPP is currently planed, about 9/10 of the existing waste will remain on site. So all of the millions of people that live in the shadow of DoE facilities and are at risk from existing nuclear waste will continue to be at risk. And then we can add to the people at risk, the people of New Mexico and all of the people 22 states that the WIPP trucks go through on their way to WIPP.

Q: Your position is that the 53 million people around the sites will not be safer?

A: The people who live near the DoE generator sites very rightly believe that the waste is improperly and unsafely stored. What they haven't been told is that the majority of that waste will stay. That there are no plans and no budget currently even on the slate at DoE to clean up that waste. WIPP will not address the majority of that waste and DoE has no plans to address it either. So the people there at risk will remain at risk and new people will be put at risk.

Q: Why should non-scientists have input on a project that is technically complex?

A: We're often told that lay people who are not scientists should not comment on WIPP because we are not technically qualified. I have several answers to that question, why should non-scientists care about WIPP or why should their opinions matter? But I would like preface it by say that science didn't bring us WIPP. We didn't get WIPP through science, we got WIPP through politics and economics and therefore it is entirely appropriate to counter it with an alternative view of politics and economics. WIPP would never have been sited in its current location by science. It was brought to that location by an oppressed local economy of people who saw it as economic development. And the science has been forced to play catch up to try to support a basically politically motivated program. And you can even question if the word science should be used. Because science actually is supposed to be an objective search for the truth and we never had that at WIPP. It's always been the uh, slave of politics. And why should non-scientists have input into this? There are three major broad areas where WIPP affects the public. One is the epic squandering of cash on this project. As taxpayers, we are subsidizing grand levels of corporate profit here for a project that solves nothing and exposes people to a great deal of risk. Two, is the proliferation issues. And that WIPP opens the door to continued covert research and testing and development of nuclear weapons and the American public has been lied to and told that the Cold War is over. The Cold War is not over because the levels of spending on nuclear weapons have remained the same or are rising. And what that means is that the Cold War is an undeclared war against the American taxpayers and so that certainty affects people. And the placement of natural resources at risk is obviously something that affects the public that's why we have national environmental laws such as NEPA and RICA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and Endangered Species all of our federal legislation that is designed to protect natural resources from profiteering. When people stand to make money from abusing resources, the natural resources are put at risk. That's been proven over and over again.

Q: What about the precedent?

A: The last reason why that it is so important for the public to be involved in this discourse is that WIPP sets a tremendously dangerous precedent. Nationally in terms of the rights that localities or states have to protect themselves and internationally where there is a large international community of people who have come to the conclusion that geologic repository is not a viable method of waste disposal and they're looking to us. And uh, to see whether in fact this project goes through. So, the precedent that is set nationally and internationally in terms of public policy, the value that we place on our natural resources, how these political decisions are made and how they are forced on the public has some very, very stirring conclusions. Some very strong ramifications that are going to affect the public in any number of issues and in decades to come.

Q: The DoE says that WIPP will solve the problem of TRU waste. Can you address this?

A: TRU waste is a term, it stands for transuranic waste which means basically plutonium contaminated waste. And the DoE has created a lot of different kinds of nuclear waste which are at the generator sites and a great many of which are already in contact with soil and water, are already posing a threat to the environment. The waste that is slated to go to WIPP is contained at the moment whereas a lot of other wastes are already in contact with the human environment and the environment that other forms of life depend on. To continually redefine what kinds of waste can and can't go to WIPP doesn't really serve us. All it is, it's a shell game that's designed to mask the fact that the majority of waste that has been created through weapons manufacturing can't go to WIPP and will stay on site and a lot of it is underground where it is going to be very difficult to retrieve it and there is not budget and no plan to get it out of there.

Q: How clean is clean?

A: So the question arises, how clean is clean? How can we say that a site is cleaned up? Is it enough to take a fraction of the waste and ship it somewhere else? Part of the problem here is that we've had no national policy establishing guidelines of what we consider clean in a nuclear contaminated site where the DoE has been creating weapons for decades. And if we make a budget first and then we dole out the money to the different sites and we say clean up as much as you can with this money, we won't get clean sites. What we need to do is set some standards that dictate how clean the sites need to be and then apply nationally across the DoE complex and then figure out how much that is going to cost. And this would be a very good moment to call attention to the hidden cost of our defense activities so that we could stop looking just at the cash out lay up front and start looking at what is involved in remiediating the environment where these processes take place. The American taxpayers need to know that those costs in many cases exceed the start up cost of the military projects.

Q: Where do you get your information about the problems at WIPP?

A: Where do citizens get their information? Why do we know so much, or claim to know so much about WIPP? We have spent so much time pouring over these environmental impact statements and these documents. Believe me, this is not how people with businesses and hobbies and relationships and children want to spend their time, but once you get drawn into a project like this you don't want to let go of it because the more you find out, the more startling it is. We have poured over these documents. And there are volumes and volumes of environmental impact statements and revised environmental impact statements that have been put out. And that's why every time the definition of the waste changes, or the story changes about what is and isn't going to be put into WIPP or how much information we are about what is in the barrels, those environmental impact statements become obsolete. Because all of a sudden it is referring to a different project than the new way the project is being described. And then we have to have another round of hearings and then we have to have another environmental impact statement. It's a colossal waste of taxpayer's money, and it's a tremendous waste of time.

Q: Make a statement that these are DOE documents.

A: Why do citizens know so much about WIPP? How can we claim to be experts on this? The Department of Energy puts out documents called environmental impact statements and uh, we read them. And so much of their glossy public relations program is undercut by what you can find on every page of the environmental impact statements. We have spent years pouring over these documents. It's an exhausting process um, it's terrible to take as much time and spend time reading these dry things. But you can find the inconsistencies, you can see where the program changes from one chapter to the next, and you can see where they have not done accurate modeling or testing or looking at a worst case scenario. It's right there in their own documents. It's publicly available.

Q: Give us a real specific example.

A: They say that the site is dry. But we know that's not true, there's a highly pressurized brine reservoir under the disposal area and there's an aquifer above the area. I've been there and I've seen moisture seeping in through the walls of the disposal area that's being dried out by fans. Um, there are independent scientists who have created other technical documents that you can have access to, Roger Anderson and the Scientist Review Panel, the EEG, there's a lot of different other scientists who are possibly more objective because they're not getting their pay check from DoE. That have given up alternate points of view about the hydrology and geology of the site. There's karst formations there that change the flow of the underground water. Nobody knows exactly what the structure is in certain areas in the uh, that the shafts have been dug vertically instead of diagonally. There's a great many alternate scientific views that the public can have access to other than just DOE party line.

Q: Did you contract yourself when you say you have seen water that is dried out? (Discussion on what she meant)
 
A: They have water seeping in through the walls of the disposal areas right now. And they're using big fans to try to dry it up so that it won't be so visible. But you can see that it's happening. When the facility is sealed up and closed up and water is being attracted by the thermal activity at a faster and faster rate, and they're not down there drying it up, there will be a water problem at the site.
 
Q: Do you have something you want to add?
 
A: The whole WIPP project is driven by money. Corporate profit and probably some individual greed drives this project. When people make money from a project then they are inclined to like it and to think it's safe. And DoE has a tremendous amount of money at its constant disposal thanks to our tax dollars and the citizens groups that toil around the clock trying to counter their glossy PR campaign don't have the same level of resources. DoE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars marketing WIPP to the American Public. Basically unsuccessfully because a tremendous amount of doubt still hovers of this project. The citizen's groups that take it on and try and shine a light on some of the potential worst case scenarios and how they would affect the public, don't have that kind of budget. It's a David and Goliath story.
 
I want to talk about how the people in the pueblos have been lied to.
 
Q: Can you say something about the half truths that people are being told?
 
A: One of the things that DoE does with it's PR budget is it goes into rural communities like Lavahata Village and like the pueblos in northern New Mexico and promotes to these people a half truth. DOE tells these people you're very concerned about radioactive waste contaminating your earth, air, and water. That's undeniably true. And it's undeniably true that these people should not be fishing in Cotchechi Lake that has plutonium in it and there should not be radioactive runoff into the Rio Grande every spring. What DoE is not telling these people is that the, there will still be radioactive contamination whether WIPP does or doesn't open. That there is so much nuclear waste on site and that the amount of nuclear waste on site will actually grow in certain places like Los Alamos where for every barrel of WIPP waste that they are able to scrape together to take to WIPP there are gallons of liquid radioactive waste that are going to be dumped into Muerton Dead Canyon that will never go to WIPP because they don't meet the waste acceptance criteria for WIPP. So these people that are living in the shadow of nuclear facilities are going to have even more waste at generator sites like Los Alamos where the plutonium pit production and other functions of bomb building have been transferred. More waste will be created, more waste will be left on site.
 
Q: Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about?
 
A: What we're trying to do is educate people to let them know that these half truths that they've heard from DOE are not the full story. I've talked to people from Carlsbad who originally are WIPP supporters and when I share with them the one fact that not one generator site will be cleaned up by WIPP and that waste will be left on site at every one of those sites, whether WIPP opens or not, it's amazing how fast they turn around on their devotion to the project. Because they have never been told that one key piece of information.
 
Q: If DoE isn't telling them, why don't the citizens groups?
 
A: Citizens groups have to deal with a certain level of hopelessness and apathy in the public that comes from two things. One is the belief that this is a done deal and we can't stop it. I of course don't agree with that. I think that the facts will come out and that they will render WIPP an unviable project because there are so many problems with it and it is so incredibly expensive. That to take 30 billion dollars to create a new mess and solve none of our existing messes with it is not in our best interest. Um, so I believe that by educating some of these people we can get around some of that apathy. The other thing that causes apathy in people is that they have been beaten down into feeling that because they are not scientist they don't have the right to comment on this very technical issue. And what we're trying to educate people, too, is the possibility that they do have a right to have a voice in this. That if we're going to say that we live in a democracy, this is a beautiful opportunity for public discourse because this affects the public in several different key ways.
 
Q: One more statement about the inequity about half truths and the money they have to promote them.
 
A: It's always stunning to contemplate the contrasts the huge budget the energy department has to promote their point of view as they try to market this very unpopular project. And the shoestring citizen groups are on as they try to promote what we as the truth um, the uh, the state of New Mexico has been targeted for this project because we were poor, because we were not as rich and not as white as a lot of other places. And that is why WIPP has come our way and that is why it is doubly important and put our foot down and stop it.

END OF INTERVIEW