Dear Friends of Nuclear Watch New Mexico:
The Los Alamos and Sandia Labs are the tip of the spear for a one-trillion dollar “modernization” program that will completely rebuild every type of warhead in the nuclear stockpile while giving them new military capabilities. This so-called modernization program will also rebuild the production side of the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex, including the proposal to quadruple production of plutonium pit bomb cores at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). This so-called modernization will be at enormous cost to the taxpayer and our disappearing middle class, robbing citizens of better schools, highways, hospitals, etc.
But we can make a difference, to which the history of Nuclear Watch New Mexico proudly attests. Four times the government has tried to expand plutonium pit production at LANL, and four times NukeWatch was key to successfully pushing that back (see <https://nukewatch.org/facts/nwd/Pit-Production-History.pdf>).
Currently, our big-ticket item at NukeWatch is the lawsuit we have filed against DOE and LANL for its failure to cleanup under a 2005 “Consent Order” negotiated with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED). We know what the Lab’s plans are for “cleanup”, which is to cap and cover and leave permanently buried some 200,000 cubic yards of radioactive and hazardous wastes in unlined pits and trenches above our precious regional aquifer, less than three miles uphill from the Rio Grande.
To cut to the quick, NukeWatch wants use its lawsuit in part to force the choice of more nuclear weapons (whose funding is going up) vs. cleanup (whose funding is going down). What do you want? If you choose cleanup, we need your support. To put it in context, LANL’s annual $2.6 billion budget (2/3’s of which is for core nuclear weapons research and production programs) is ~16,000 times bigger than ours, so please regard any contribution as helping to even out the odds. We proudly claim that we punch way above our weight class. Full, comprehensive cleanup would be a real win-win for New Mexicans, permanently protecting the environment and our precious water supplies while creating 100’s of high-paying long-term jobs!
Please mail a check today to: Nuclear Watch New Mexico, 903 W. Alameda #325, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Please make check out to “SRIC”, our fiscal agent. You can also donate online at www.nukewatch.org All donations are fully tax deductible. Please be as generous as you can.
Thank you so much for your consideration.
Jay Coghlan Scott Kovac
Executive Director Research Director