The nuclear triangle: has the Southwest been selected as America's nuclear waste dump?

Bill Addington stands West Texas-tall behind the register of the general store he runs with his mother in the tiny town of Sierra Blanca. He generally speaks softly but firmly, with the politeness of a southern gentleman ("Yes, ma'am; No, sir"). He has the self-effacing tone of someone who grew up in a small town, where those who talk too big are quickly "put in their place." But when the subject of waste dumping comes up, his tone quickly shifts. Addington, president of Save Sierra Blanca, which opposes a proposed nuclear waste dump near El Paso, refers to the radioactive waste consortiums targeting his region as "the nuclear carpetbaggers," conjuring up local sentiments dating back to the Civil War.

Opponents of nuclear waste disposal in the Southwest have charged that their region has been chosen as a national sacrifice area for dangerous radioactive wastes. These hazardous materials are being forced on the Southwest, they say, because it lacks the political and economic clout of other regions.

In southern New Mexico and western Texas, three large, centralized radioactive waste facilities have been proposed within 100 miles of each other. There is a growing resentment against nuclear dumping in this traditionally conservative region, due to the threat to scarce, precious water supplies. As if to add to the insult, much of the waste proposed to be buried there would come from nuclear facilities in the more populous and politically powerful eastern states. Ironically, the three outfits leading the charge to open West Texas and Sierra Blanca to becoming a national nuclear waste site are the Maine Yankee, Vermont Yankee and Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power companies.

Although major waste facilities are also proposed for southeastern California and southern Nevada, waste opponents in the Texas/New Mexico region say they've been targeted because of "environmental racism," the science - and it is a science - of siting unpopular and hazardous facilities in economically disadvantaged communities, particularly those of color.

Rufina Laws is a Mescalero Apache Indian. Tall and silver-haired, a mother of three, she is outraged by plans to build a storage facility for intensely radioactive used nuclear fuel on her tribe's reservation just north of Sierra Blanca, in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico.

The tribe's president, Wendell Chino, supports the plan because of the money it could bring to the tribe. (Tribal officials have already received over $300,000 just for "studying" the proposal.) But the idea of nuclear waste on Indian land runs in direct opposition to the core beliefs of Indians like Laws. She has a deeply traditional Native American reverence for the Earth, which makes such a proposal appear as a kind of blasphemy. She minces no words in describing her tribe's situation: "For 500 years, the white western culture has tried to extinguish Native Americans as a group. We have been given malnutrition, poverty, alcoholism, disease, and now a nuclear waste dump. We're still fighting genocide."

While politicians from New England and Texas propose to bury mountains of "low-level" nuclear waste in shallow trenches in Sierra Blanca, a consortium of utility companies is backing the plan to put most of the nation's high-level nuclear waste into "temporary" storage on the Mescalero Reservation (although no one is willing to say for sure where it will go when the "temporary" period is up).

Meanwhile, another nuclear project that rivals both of these in scope sits just to the southeast of the Mescalero reservation, forming the third leg of what Addington, Laws and others have come to refer to as "the nuclear triangle." Here, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Westinghouse Nuclear have drilled an enormous complex of tunnels in a bedded salt formation a half mile underground, where they hope to bury almost a million barrels of plutonium-contaminated military waste, which has been piling up at the nation's nuclear weapons factories since the beginning of the cold war. Lawsuits and Congressional controversy have kept radioactive waste out of the ground there for almost 20 years, but the project is strongly supported by the local business community in Carlsbad, since about 700 workers are tenuously employed at the still-unused site.

These three sites together could handle the nation's entire commercial nuclear waste inventory, if called upon to do so. The only other type of nuclear waste left in the federal classification system is "transuranic," or plutonium-contaminated waste, all of which is presently destined for the Carlsbad site, according to the DOE's plans. Opening of any of these sites would break a long-standing logjam in the nuclear disposal system.

Richard Boren, organizer for the international Environmental Alliance of the Bravo (LAB) in El Paso, has made a career of fighting pollution along the Texas/Mexico border. According to Boren, "If all three of these projects open, we will have the largest concentration of nuclear waste in the United States right here in southern New Mexico and West Texas. That will be forever. A leak or a transportation accident from any of these sites could contaminate large areas of both states. We need to form a united front to fight these nuclear projects because radiation does not respect any boundaries."

Boren and his colleagues have received the support of national environmental groups on both sides of the border, including Greenpeace and Mexico's Grupo de los Cien Artistas y Intellectuales (Group of 100 Artists and Intellectuals). In the last Congress, Texas Representative Ron Coleman joined with New Mexico's Bill Richardson to stop ratification of an interstate compact that would have officially opened the Sierra Blanca site. This year, the ratification never got off the House floor. But even with anti-dump sentiment growing in the region, the issue isn't likely to just fade away.

CONTACTS: Save Sierra Blanca, P.O. 218, Sierra Blanca, TX 79851/[phone]; Environmental Alliance of the Bravo, P.O. Box 3367, El Paso, TX 79923/[phone].