After snapping my jaw back into place, subsequent to my incredulity from digesting Anastasia Hufham’s crystalline Tribune report critically illuminating a Camp Williams development, which would bring uranium processing (possibly even uranium enrichment, no less) to Bluffdale, on the Wasatch Front, demands not only public response, but action. Utah has gone stark raving nuts!
If the state of Utah, owner of Camp Williams, were to set out to create the greatest possible danger to the greatest number of people for the longest period of time, the concept would look exactly like this one. Proposing to use any property anywhere in the entire region to process and enrich uranium is crazy, by itself. But to attempt to do so in the midst of a burgeoning urban population is truly beyond credulity.
Utah already has committed environmental and ecological suicide many times over, combining Kennecott’s mega-mine, with inescapable highway/housing developments, with industrial agriculture, with “inland port” developments, conspiring to poison, bury, choke, crowd, gag and parch this formerly Great Salt Lake and ancient Valley likely beyond recovery. In the past, we had excuses: We were stupid, and slow to exercise basic principles of environmental economics and ecological justice.
Utah Energy’s proposed uranium enrichment operation, however, would blast beyond such excuses. No “bunker-buster bombs” would be required for this ultimately savage act of avarice to destroy us all. Southeastern Utah’s catastrophic health impacts on Native American tribes during WWII and the Cold War can have taught us nothing were this project to proceed. Attempting to reconcile economic development on real estate held by developers simultaneously impatient, avaricious and in scientific denial, with eagerness to turn a blind, counter-compassionate eye to radioactivity’s effects on life, is nothing short of evil. Here, uranium would have no half-life. Just no life at all, after centuries of horrifying pain.
Ivan Weber, Salt Lake City
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