Raw deal for Bangor

Let me get this straight: three New York businessmen, one a restaurant owner with no experience in radioactive waste handling, want to use Bangor International Airport as the location for their venture in exporting radioactive waste. Bangor would be the very first in the country.

We don’t know where the waste will come from or how the levels of radiation will be verified. (Since hospital waste takes only eight months to become safe, I’m betting there’s more to it than rubber gloves and test tubes!) All this after we voted to send our own low-level waste to Texas! All of us who didn’t want waste stored in our communities now can have 900,000 pounds a week of out-of-state waste trucked up I-95

Okay, so it isn’t permanent storage: nearly a ton a week in trucks and flying overhead sounds worse to me. It certainly will sound worse to tourists who come here because Maine is so unspoiled. It certainly will be worse for anyone in Bangor or the nearby towns who discover their houses won’t be worth as much. I don’t doubt this is a great moneymaker for those New York businessmen. For the rest of us, it sounds like a raw deal. Lesley Palmer Frankfort