..."Back in the early 1990s, the state of Vermont had a problem. The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant was generating tons and tons of radioactive waste, but there was nowhere palatable in the state to store it. The only town which was willing to study the possibility, Vernon, was deemed “geologically unstable.” No other towns in Vermont, quite reasonably, wanted the waste.
By October of 1998, Vermont had a solution.A deal had been worked out between Vermont’s Congressional representation, Texas Representative Joe Barton, and then-Governor George W. Bush. The legislation, which was cosponsored and championed by then-Representative Bernie Sanders, was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998.
Senator Paul Wellstone, who is often mentioned in the same breath as Sanders among the latter’s supporters, was opposed to the legislation.
The people of Vermont didn’t have much of a problem with the deal. But Texans and their Mexican neighbors over the Rio Grande were outraged.
A delegation from Texas reached out to Sanders and tried to reason with him, citing the environmental and human degradation the waste site would create. They thought they would get an empathetic response from the nominal socialist.They were wrong.
Sanders’ reply was curt, abrupt, and final: “My position is unchanged and you’re not going to like it.” When asked if he would at least visit the proposed site in Sierra Blanca, he said: “Absolutely not. I’m gonna to be running for re-election in the state of Vermont.”
The real costs of generating nuclear energy for Vermont, Sanders made clear, would be borne by a small, poor, majority-Hispanic community in Texas. The politically powerless people of Sierra Blanca- where the median income is only $10,500– were chosen to bear the toxic burden of Vermont’s electricity...."
= new reply since forum marked as read
