Nuclear Dump Closes

In regard to “Nuclear Waste Dump Shuts Doors to All but 8 States” (June 4), South Carolina’s decision to limit access to their nuclear waste facility is great! This decision will force California to open the Ward Valley site. The environmentalists’ concern about contaminating the ground water in the area is a non-problem. Unprocessed nuclear waste (or chemical waste) can be rendered harmless for storage at Ward Valley (or the ocean) by the process of solidification in plaster of Paris, and stored in concrete pipe, sealed at both ends with concrete. The cost of this approach is minuscule. Let’s hope our bureaucrats “see the light.”

PHIL C. BALDWIN

El Segundo

* The Ward Valley dump site should never be built. The argument that medical care would suffer is untrue. Non-radioactive technologies, which are safe and non-polluting, exist to replace the radioactive systems, which are dangerous and must be continuously stored for up to thousands of years. The new technology can be used for both medical care and medical research. The new non-radioactive technologies have not been fully implemented because the dump sites provide a cheap subsidy to users of radioactivity that should be borne by those users, not the taxpayers. The taxpayers will ultimately have to clean up Ward Valley 30 or 40 years from now when the private company has taken its profit and is long gone.

WILLIAM E. SHELL MD

Beverly Hills