Subject line: Comment on Document number: DOE/EIS-0573 To whom it may concern: There's a large field full of radioactive debris at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Every time it rains, the debris field spreads out a little more. Eventually it will reach the Rio Grande, drinking water for millions. Why did this happen? The Bomb. Building nuclear bombs is the most environmentally destructive endeavor human beings have ever engaged in. And not just once: We didn't learn our lesson, even though that very first project, to build the first nuclear bombs, was so environmentally destructive that nearly a century later we STILL haven't finished cleaning up the radioactive contamination in dozens of places around the country: Alamogordo, LANL, LLNL, ORNL, Hanford, Portsmouth... Since the "grand achievement" of the Manhattan Project (bombing the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), thousands of nuclear bombs have destroyed entire cultures due to "peaceful" testing of nuclear weapons by the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea... Clearly the world's "most advanced" countries don't understand the fragility of our small blue dot in a vast uninhabitable universe! (Mars is only inhabitable by removing items from Earth and bringing them to Mars. And then only maybe, and only with regular resupply voyages.) Or is it that they don't understand the fragility of life? When The Bomb was being built, DNA had not yet been deciphered. By the time the public was aware of DNA's role in reproduction, the Atoms For Peace propaganda program had already begun. That there could be severe health consequences even from low doses of radiation was well-known by then, but the role of radiation-induced DNA damage causing cancers, strokes, heart attacks, birth deformities and other complications had not yet been unraveled. Times have changed. The way radiation damages the human genome (and all species' genomes) is well-known and has been studied extensively. Linear, No Threshold (LNT) is widely accepted (such as by the BIER-VII report) as the best rough estimate of radiation damage. LNT means that ANY amount of radiation is capable of initiating health effects. The incidence rate is roughly proportional to dose; but the magnitude of the effects are not. One alpha or beta particle, or one gamma ray, can damage one DNA chain in one cell in one body, which can start a fatal cancer. Currently America has approximately 18,000 nuclear warheads; several thousand of which are "active" (in an airplane, missile, or submarine, waiting to be used at a moment's notice). Several thousand more are in "reserve," and about 10,000 older pits are in semi-permanent storage. Why so many? But having them, why in the world would we need MORE?!? The current ones would still work (studies have confirmed that again and again). We know how to make new nuclear bombs from old nuclear bombs, but the process is expensive and produces its own stream of impossible-to-manage nuclear waste. It is actually somewhat cleaner to produce new plutonium from uranium "blankets" of U-238 surrounding a neutron-producing source, but then we would have even MORE plutonium with no safe way to dispose of it, as well as the radioactive waste from the reactor producing the neutrons. Neither "alternative" makes any sense because we don't need new bombs. Modern warfare is done with drones and cyber attacks, and that won't be changing any time soon. There are plans to make as many as 15,000 MORE nuclear pits over the next 30 years. And no plans to throw any away, because we don't know how — and because we might want them if we're desperate and the first few thousand (the ones already in service today) don't accomplish whatever level of destruction or "payback" we think some other part of the planet deserves. Sounds crazy because it is. They didn't call it "MAD" ("Mutual Assured Destruction") for nothing! It's crazy, but it's what the world calls "nuclear deterrence" — with no proof that it's deterred anything, or ever will. Maybe it has delayed the inevitable? Maybe someone's itching to break the logjam and use them? Maybe his name is Trump? Or why ELSE would anyone need 15,000 new nuclear warheads over the next 30 years? And at what cost? What environmental cost, including the environmental cost to the planet if there's a nuclear war? At what economic cost, including the cost of alternatives that there's no money for because it's all used on nuclear weapons, year after year after year? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Enough to purchase millions of drones for soldiers actually on the battlefields. Enough to buy all the F-16s that have ever been built (the world's most successful fighter aircraft). Enough to rebuild every school in the nation to be sure it has adequate meal service (at no cost to the parents), and well-paid teachers who are well-supplied with everything from crayons to fast global Internet access. Freedom to learn. And should someone ever decide to use these new "pits" (or should an AI attack plan advise it, and an obedient human follow along), what if the new pits don't work? Since we can't test them, will we launch multiple nuclear missiles to be sure one works? That will probably spread the environmental pollution from the duds along with the fission products from the bomb(s) that do work — how much environmental pollution is a war crime? Does it depend on why we're fighting, as well as which poisons we unleash, and how many people are killed or wounded, and perhaps most of all: Were they involved or innocent bystanders, or people who came along later, perhaps a thousand generations later? Some part of any decision regarding plutonium pit production is a monetary decision: In this case, nearly four billion dollars is the estimated annual cost, involving an estimated 13,000 employees. That's nearly $300,000.00 per person! For that much money, for that many people taken out of the workforce for anything else, America should get something useful: Rooftop solar build-out. Rebuilding the energy grid to modern standards. High speed rail. Free college. We could even put it into foreign aide and make friends instead of enemies! We can only lose if we put our money and our efforts into atomic bombs. They are overkill. A war crime. A political threat than must never be carried out -- in fact it can't even be threatened — except without actually saying it: "We will wipe the enemy off the face of the earth" and similar phrases can have few other meanings, when coming from the president of a nuclear-armed war machine. Just as it has been said that we each breath a few atoms of Caesar's last breath with every breath we take, so too do we each have the remains of not just the Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs — but of EVERY nuclear bomb that has ever been tested! There is a trace of each one in every one of us. History leaves its mark. We find it in baby's teeth, we find it in statistical studies of cancer clusters around nuclear power plants and nuclear waste dumps. We find it in the need to raise metal ships that sank PRIOR to the "atomic age" if we want metals that are totally free of as much radiation as possible, because ALL metal manufactured nowadays is contaminated in minute — but detectable — amounts. Amounts that can weaken alloys and ruin delicate measurements. If there were no environmental worries regarding the use of nuclear weapons (an imaginary situation), there would still be political, moral and military problems. Politically the world has held off using nuclear weapons since 1945, having seen how horrible their use was in Japan. "War is hell" was known before the atomic age but bringing a hellfire upon so many people in a fraction of a second was something new. Morally, the radioactive debris left for future generations to deal with (and suffer from) is an outrage. And militarily, nuclear war is the most expensive way to win a war ever invented, and the most likely to result in future terrorism against the aggressing country. Why? Because everyone knows that the horror of nuclear weapons doesn't cease when the bomb explodes. And because genocide is a crime against humanity. Plutonium is commonly described as "the deadliest stuff on earth." It's been calculated that a single kilogram, if divided evenly into barely-visible specs of dust and diabolically placed in every human's lung, would cause lung cancer in everyone on earth. And since Pu-239 has a half-life of about 24,100 years, that one particle of plutonium (comprised of billions of atoms of plutonium), if it were diabolically extracted from that person's body and inserted into the lung of someone from the next generation, would be nearly as likely to guarantee that next person's lung cancer...and this sequence could continue for more than a thousand generations, and by then that same little chunk of plutonium would still cause lung cancer in about half the victims. Making plutonium is a terrible thing to do, an insult to humanity. Releasing it into the environment in the form of a bomb, or carelessly through abandonment, adds injury to insult. Building nuclear weapons can't make any friends; using them can only make enemies. Nuclear weapons destroy history: Buildings, libraries, museums, schools... They destroy people: Their memories, knowledge, customs and talents. We should be building beautiful buildings with those billions, instead of building weapons that can destroy everything. Threatening nuclear war is no way to make friends. Living in fear of nuclear war is no way to live, and no way to plan for the future. Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA ###
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
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Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
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