By John C. Wester, SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | July 21, 2024 santafenewmexican.com

My archdiocese, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet 79 years after Oppenheimer’s Trinity test, our state still hosts the nuclear weapons complex, while New Mexicans’ needs go unaddressed. This fiscal year, the Department of Energy is spending $7 billion in New Mexico on nuclear weapons. This is more than what the whole state spends on education, in which we rank dead last in the nation.

Some $2 billion of this nukes money is for producing brand new plutonium pits — bomb cores for nuclear warheads — to arm the Air Force’s controversial and exorbitant new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. But many experts believe the program is a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and, in fact, makes Americans less safe. Congress should cancel Sentinel and instead compensate New Mexicans and thousands across the nation harmed by U.S. nuclear weapons production and testing and address urgent challenges like education, economic inequality, homelessness and addiction.

Countless New Mexicans — many of whom are my parishioners — have suffered from generations of cancers due to radioactive fallout from the Trinity test. One of my parishioners and a survivor of radiation-induced cancer, Tina Cordova, just last year experienced the tragedy of her 23-year-old niece being the fifth generation in her family to get cancer.

“We don’t ask ourselves if we’re going to get cancer; we ask when,” says Tina. And her family is far from alone.

After over 200 above-ground U.S. nuclear tests, in 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to provide limited medical help for some communities harmed by the tests. Yet the first victims of nuclear testing, New Mexicans — along with many other Americans — have been arbitrarily excluded from RECA.
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BY MARIAN NARANJO AND KATHY SANCHEZ, SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | July 21, 2024 santafenewmexican.com

On Monday, top officials from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Environmental Management will host a town hall on cleanup priorities.

A limited public question-and-answer period will be allowed, and it’s unclear whether the security administration will respond to written submissions. With only one town hall hosted annually, the public — especially fenceline New Mexicans and Indigenous community members — must be heard and considered.

A growing number of DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration projects are amassing joint public and tribal concern. At a February public meeting, Pueblo leadership, local officials, environmentalists, and community members voiced overwhelming opposition to the security administration’s Electrical Power Capacity Upgrade Project, a transmission line proposed to span the sacred Caja del Rio landscape.

The three-hour meeting saw no public support for the project and instead featured widespread concern agencies aren’t following legal requirements for environmental and cultural review. The All-Pueblo Council of Governors recently urged a pause in the project pending a tribally-led ethnographic study of the Caja del Rio.

Additionally, the National Nuclear Security Administration is developing Los Alamos National Laboratory’s sitewide environmental impact statement to evaluate potential impacts of expanded lab operations over the next 15 years. Given that the statement should have been completed in 2018 and LANL’s budget has doubled in the last five years to $5.15 billion, public concerns are growing about the lack of opportunity to review expansion plans.

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