Will Rick Perry bring high-level radioactive waste to Texas?

[Jimbo101]

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/will-rick-perry-bring-high-level-radioactive-waste-texas/lZD13kPkWxxRzVuj3Ta5tO/

(may be paywalled)

As governor, Rick Perry urged the federal government to make Texas the repository for highly radioactive waste from around the nation.

The company that most stood to benefit had an owner who was one of the top donors to Perry’s campaigns.

Now Perry is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be U.S. energy secretary — putting him in prime position to influence who gets permission to build the highly lucrative radioactive waste facility.

Bullish on nuclear waste

As governor, Perry was bullish on storing waste in Texas.

In March 2014, Perry unveiled a state environmental agency report — one he had ordered — that determined Texas was a suitable spot for the nuclear waste.

“The citizens of Texas — and every other state currently storing radioactive waste — have been betrayed by their federal government,” Perry wrote in a letter to Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, and then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, because a federal solution to long-term storage of the waste doesn’t exist despite billions of dollars paid by utilities to pay for a site.

[TexasTowelie]

1. Welcome to DU!

It's a certainty that west Texas will see the waste dump expanded. I don't believe that any of the Republican leaders (Abbott, Patrick, Patton or Strauss) will obstruct any plans to make Texas glow. They will use the premise of the jobs coming to an area with little economic opportunity and brag about the safety of the dump to silence the critics. It will be a destructive legacy to leave for the generations of Texas that follow us.

[Jimbo101]

5. Thanks for the welcome !

- long time reader here - but rarely posted - definitely plenty to talk about -

[HassleCat]

2. I should hope so!

Need that high level stuff. No point in cooling around with that low level junk.

By the way, the designations of high level vs. Low level are not indicative of the amount of radiation they admit. Low level radioactive waste can be very "hot."

[longship]

3. Nope! It will be classified as a nutritious supplement.

Kellogg's Special P, P as in plutonium.

The last two Energy Secretaries had PhDs in physics, one of them a Nobel Prize in same. Since the Energy Department oversees both the nuclear weapons repository and the national labs that work with such materials, one would think that putting a numb-nuts in charge was not a good idea.

But there we go. We've got Drumpf now and this is what it is.

Duck and Cover is coming back sooner than those of us who witnessed it the first time only imagined in our nightmares.

Here:

[bagelsforbreakfast]

4. to venerable old "Niggerhead"? Say it's not so!

Perhaps this is merely a preview of Trump's newest country-club - "Pussy-a-largo" with bottled water shipped directly from Flint, MI.