A recent Top Ten story of 2024 that covered the hold-up in the planned cleanup of the Manhattan Project waste stored in the Niagara Falls Storage Site was insightful. Much of this project’s cleanup plan consists of digging up the waste here, trucking it to Michigan, and then reburying it in another waste site. Apparently, before their plan was developed, no one took the time to ask our neighbors in Michigan if that was OK with them. Why anyone would think that waste we don’t want buried here would be welcomed for burial in another place escapes me.
Their plan, however, is an excellent example of how government often projects an illusion of solving a problem by doing “stuff,” a “see, we’re working on it” mentality. Federal government hubris is clearly on display when their solution to a problem they created over 70 years ago and inflicted on our community is to use similar technology and transfer the problem to another community. The waste problem they created needs to be solved. Buying more time by “kicking the can down the road” is not acceptable.
In the 1940s our scientists were able to create the revolutionary technology that led to the atom bomb and nuclear power. Our current scientists should be able to develop processes to decontaminate the byproducts and wastes that resulted from that project. We need innovative thinking and not a continuation of the bury it and forget thinking that we used in the past.
JEFFREY MANNING, Lewiston