Letter: Nuclear travesty must be halted

Tuesday, May 4, 1999 | 6:37 a.m.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is supposed to be impartial, is pressuring her agency to set the health and environmental standards for the nation. They want to raise allowable radiation doses from 15 millirems to 25 millirems. Why does the NRC want to kill our children from the exposure to high-level radioactive nuclear waste as it travels across 42 states?

This irresponsible government agency travesty can no longer be hidden from the people of this country. There are 60 million women who vote that do not want their children to die from cancer.

The answer is to transmute (reprocess with new science and proven science) waste from the 126,000 tons of high-level waste into 200 pounds of waste that can be safely stored until or if it is needed. The cost will be far less than the billions of dollars that has already been spent from the ratepayers who use nuclear power; the remaining billions can be spent to transmute and save the nation.

Congress should re-evaluate this unscientific mess. I am sure that the Congress does not want to subject those who vote for them to suffer from this potentially deadly exposure. No repository at Yucca Mountain!

SALLY DEVLIN