Nuclear Tap Water?

Nuclear Tap Water?

by Bob Anderson

The city's plan to tap into the river for drinking water not only raises our taxes and endangers the ecosystem but harms our health as well (Journal, 12-10-00, Tapping Into the River).

We have plenty of pure ground water here but it is being given to private sector, high-tech manufacturers to wash computer chips and to supply obsolete war related facilities placed here in the Cold War era.

The city's plan is a whopper IRB of corporate welfare to the industrial military complex.

The mayor and council want to give away the water under our feet and make us pay to import water from Colorado.

This already steep price increase will grow with immense cost overruns when folks reject drinking dirty water.

Plus, we have been told not to swim in, drink from, or eat fish from Cochiti Lake or the Rio Grande because it is a toxic soup of fertilizer run-off, pharmaceutical dumping, and radioactive waste from the Los Alamos nuclear lab.

The present plan leaves out the important point that this cancer-causing toxic soup will be combated with another toxic soup of chemicals.

As far as I know, there is no way to remove the 50 years of radioactive materials deposited in the river.

Scientists, beginning with Rachel Carson, have pointed out that chemicals mixed with nuclear materials become synergistic inside the human body and magnify the odds of cancers and other diseases.

The projected doubling of our population and the Cerro Grande Fire last year indicate that more, not less, drugs and radioactive waste will wash down the river in the future.

Unaddressed in this narrow plan is what happens when Los Alamos takes over the failed Rocky Flats plutonium pit production which was shut down due to the high level of contamination that goes with this processing.

That plant will be on the hills above our already toxic river.
Obviously, this plan has many hidden features like hidden costs and increased cancer rates.

We do need planning, but it has to start with an evaluation of just what type of industries and population densities are sustainable in this high desert environment.

I don't believe we should accept toxic tap water and should fight to stop the City's plan.

One basic point should guide any use of the public's pure aquifer water under our feet: it should be used for humans to drink, not to subsidize high-tech stockholders and bloated corporate/military bases.

We should not be paying higher taxes for poorer water.

In fact, our water rates would probably go down if the private sector and military built their own water import system and we citizens used the aquifer water.