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Friday, March 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

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Letter: A chance to clean up Hanford

By Pat Campbell, VANCOUVER
Published: November 18, 2016, 6:00am

Many of us got an email from the Sierra Club requesting emergency funds to fight Donald Trump’s agenda. I have a better idea.

Now that he has shaken up the political scene and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is gone, the Sierra Club can encourage a bipartisan effort to move our nation’s radioactive waste to the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada. We’ve spent billions creating this facility and we need to use it for its essential purpose — removing our Columbia River overhanging dump of nuclear bomb-making garbage to a safe and secure place before it totally ruins our lands and waters in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not like an oil spill that might take a few decades to clean up. Radioactive contamination is, by human standards, forever.

Now that the political calculus which Reid made with President Obama is toast, maybe U.S. senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell; U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas; Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers, R-Wash.; and, yes, Trump supporter Don Benton can get this done and create an everlasting legacy for themselves. If they don’t, then we and our descendants who rely on the Columbia River for food, water and pleasure will be toast.

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