Insight New Mexico: Don Hancock’s update on recent WIPP leak

June 12, 2014

Features, Insight New Mexico, Politics / Current Events, Envirolocal

By V.B. Price

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V.B. Price gets an update on the WIPP leak from Don Hancock, Director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program for the SW Research and Information Center.

This piece was written by:

V.B. Price

V.B. Price is editor and co-founder of New Mexico Mercury. He is the former editor of Century Magazine and New Mexico Magazine, former city editor of the New Mexico Independent, and long-time columnist for the late Albuquerque Tribune. His latest book is The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. He retired as the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at UNM Press in 2010. He has taught in the UNM Honors Program since l986.

Contact V.B. Price

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Responses to “Insight New Mexico: Don Hancock’s update on recent WIPP leak”

How much truth is in this statement? No one addressed this that I know of.

Whatdoesitmean.com reported. A "highly significant" portion of the nuclear waste being stored at the WIPP, this report continues, was the result of the recently completed 1993 HEU Purchase Agreement between the United States and Russia that saw 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from nuclear weapons down blended into low-enriched uranium and then sent to America where it was made into fuel for nuclear power plants, and of which US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz stated, "For two decades, one in 10 light bulbs in America has been powered by nuclear material from Russian nuclear warheads."

Critical to note, however, this report says, is that the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), the private American corporation serving as executive agent for the HEU Purchase Agreement, was "deliberately targeted" for elimination by the Obama administration in early 2009 leading to its 16 December 2013 announcement that it had reached an agreement with a majority of its debt holders to file a prearranged and voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring in the first quarter of 2014. Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence experts contributing to this report say the US wanted to eliminate USEC to divert HEU Purchase Agreement uranium for the purpose of reconstituting it to its highly dangerous U-235 level to conduct experiments at the WIPP on what is called nuclear salt-water rockets (NSWR), which is a proposed type of nuclear thermal rocket designed by Robert Zubrin that would be fueled by water bearing dissolved salts of plutonium or U-235.

Posted by LibertyTreeBud on 2014-07-06 09:39:48

screwed by design

Posted by LibertyTreeBud on 2014-07-06 08:34:44

The true tragedy will come when there is a uncontainable plutonium release and the whole central and eastern US is exposed to plutonium. Then we will be sorry. Until then, we will just talk.

Posted by Estim8z on 2014-06-24 10:04:26

It's almost Greek tragedy to be listening to such a knowledgeable voice on this subject, and realize there are so many on the other side who are hell bent on continuing to store nuclear waste in at-risk sites. Thank you, NMM, for continuing to update us on this dangerous situation in the southern part of our state.

Posted by Margaret Randall on 2014-06-13 07:29:53