Carlsbad Caverns

I recently read an article about Carlsbad, New Mexico confirming what I had already seen first hand during my time in Southern Colorado. The government is moving thousands of tons of radioactive waste down to New Mexico to be buried in the earth near Carlsbad. It was a regular occasion for me to see trucks carrying huge metal containers marked with radioactive stickers heading South on I-25 towards New Mexico. In fact, I would see them almost daily, sometimes several times day.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when there are so many containers of nuclear waste that they become a permanent fixture to the drive between Denver and Carlsbad. And as of several months ago, they were still going. I may just have to come up with a postcard or something to try to sell to the Southern Colorado tourism boards. I can picture it now...

"Visit Sunny Southern Colorado! Get your picture taken next to one of these trucks carrying oversized kegs of beer, straight from the Rocky Flats 'brewery'. Ignore the radioactive sticker - didn't you know that they have to split the atom to make beer? If you thought regular beer made you feel funny, wait 'til you see what this stuff does!"

Even sadder is the idea that we're just burying this stuff in the ground. New Mexico already has plenty of environmental problems, so I guess the government figured, "hey, what's another hundred thousand tons of nucelar waste?" (It may be more, but I doubt it's less...I'm just pulling that figure out of a hat). My wife and I almost moved to New Mexico at one point, but changed our mind after seeing some activist posters at the local University depicting birth defects from contaminated local water supplies.

According to a recent article at Wired.com, the government is currently in the process of developing a cautionary signage system to warn future generations not to tamper with the large buckets of goo buried under Carlsbad. Their concern is that some race of people (aliens?) at some point in the distant future will discover our hidden treasure of glowing waste and, unable to discern our primitive language, not know enough to stay away from it.

They liken it to the pyramids of egypt, in that the Egyptians did whatever they could to include notices of warning to would-be trespassers, but the western world ignored these and ransaacked them anyways. Would future generations be so insensitive and treasure-obsessed? If history is any indicator, then yes.

I find it so ironic that our government has the nerve to tell other countries that they cannot pursue a nuclear program, when ours has been (is?) so productive. My guess is that we are running out of space under the ground in Carlsbad, and that when we decide to take over these other countries in the not-too-distant future, we won't have any room left to store their nuclear waste. So, we better put a stop to it before it becomes a problem.

One thing's for sure, I wouldn't set foot in Carlsbad Caverns any time in the next several hundred years...you know how government work can be, and with the thousands of barrels of this stuff that they're sealing up and shipping to New Mexico, they're bound to have a few leakers here and there.