So I heard on the news this morning that they’re trying to ship nuclear waste from Washington State to New Mexico. And I thought, why limit it to nuclear waste? I mean, let’s pick a state (it doesn’t have to be New Mexico) and just declare it the garbage dump for the entire country. Then instead of trying not to create garbage and nuclear and other toxic waste or worrying about treating sewage and whatnot, we just haul all our shit to the designated state and dump it there.
Ideally it’d be a state that isn’t densely populated where people would be less likely to fall into the bigass holes in the ground we’d be digging, and it should probably be a poor state that we can bribe into doing it by paying them off (the money could go to shell corporations run by people who live someplace nice and don’t pay taxes, and we could make a big show of buying iPhones – which will only intermittently connect to WiFi – for Miss Clancy’s fourth-grade class).
Mexico would be ideal, but I can’t see shipping any more jobs out of the country, so we should keep it in-house. Somewhere in the southwest would probably be ideal – the dry air would quickly desiccate all stinky stuff and hopefully it wouldn’t smell so bad. Plus sand would be easier to dig up and bury shit in (ever see what cats do to a sandbox?).
Since New Mexico apparently has a nuke waste facility in place already, they’d have to be in the running (plus they have a lot of indigenous people out there, and we wouldn’t have to worry what they think about it), but I think Arizona and Texas should be given the opportunity to bid as well. I suppose Mississippi and Alabama would probably want in on the action, too.
Then there’s Wyoming, Utah, the Dakotas…. Lots of empty space in that area. And since they seem to be big proponents of fracking for oil and natural gas, I can’t see a little radioactive waste or human sludge bothering them much.
The main thing is that we shouldn’t stop doing all the stuff we do that creates toxic waste that will never degrade in a hundred lifetimes. We should just find a place to dump it.