THE OTHER WIPP (Continued)

I was taught, or at least I have come to believe, that scientific thinking differs from other kinds of thought two ways. The first is in making a serious effort to remain objective and credible no matter what the consequences. The second way is in trying to prove that a brilliant idea (hypothesis) that just came into your head or someone else's head is wrong. When I joined the WIPP project in 1975 Wendell Weart was the boss, and the brilliant idea (hypothesis) was that the site in New Mexico they had chosen for WIPP was a good place to dispose of nuclear waste. My job, as I saw it,was disproving the hypothesis.

The assumption in a political project like WIPP is that the starting hypothesis is correct, the site is suitable, the cause is just, and the battle can be won. Mission science is a team effort and you are either on the team or you are on the other side. On one side is the Official WIPP with its army of scientists within Sandia Labs, Westinghouse, DOD, DOE, EPA, NRC, NAS, and other agencies and institutions influenced by the nuclear lobby. Millions of Federal dollars have been spent on public relations, public tours, outreach, state oversight programs, education in the schools, stakeholder meetings, and other ways to assure the public that WIPP is benign and the problems of nuclear waste are being handled and resolved. On the other side is the Other WIPP with its handful of unpaid or barely paid environmentalists, scant scientific credentials, and limited access to inside information. Occasionally, a defector or a mole will pass on some unfiltered information from the other side.

I feel sorry for students assigned to prepare a report on WIPP. I searched the WEB and found over 60 titles mentioning WIPP. Most pages were sponsored by Federal and State agencies such as DOE and EPA or institutions with ties to the nuclear industry.

http://www.epa.gov/docs/rpdweb00/wipp/index.html

http://www.em.doe.gov/rtc1994/wipp.html

http://www.wipp.carlsbad.nm.us/wipp.htm

http://www.nsc.org/ehc/guidebks/wipptoc.htm

I did find one page that was anti-nuclear

CCNS at http://www.nuclearactive.org/

Informative sites include the Steve Zappe's WIPP page

http://rgfn.epcc.edu/users/ad343/wipp.html,

and a chronology of WIPP at

http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/wipp/chronolo.htm

The official web sites provide a mixture of complicated, accurate, inaccurate, half-true information, but little about problems at WIPP. There is not enough space here to clarify much of the misinformation so I have chosen a few examples to illustrate the difference between the Official WIPP and the Other WIPP.

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