In his July 6 letter to the editor, Harold O. Johnson reduces the objections to nuclear waste storage to one of political correctness on the part of the governor. He ends with a request for any other objection, as if the only possible objection could be political correctness.
I don't know what Mr. Johnson's background is, and I wouldn't want to offend someone who might have expertise in some part of this equation. He claims to have examined above-ground storage facilities and has found them to be perfectly safe.Not being an expert myself, I only need to look at the best that man has ever built and ask how many years will it survive? The lifespan of deadly nuclear waste is on the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Our oldest structures - the ruins of past civilizations - are only a few thousand years old, and they are called ruins for a reason.
Many of the existing nuclear-waste storage efforts have failed to contain these extremely corrosive and deadly materials. Is popular politics the only argument against taking on this huge problem? It's popular politics that got us here in the first place, now it's time for reason and true science to study this deadly legacy.
R. Kelly Kremer
West Valley City