“War stories.” The term has a very special, and endearing, meaning among reporters and editors.

And certainly no less so among environmental reporters in particular.

But now the term may be taking on an entirely new meaning.

War story, as in Cold War story. As in legacy of the five-decade-long Cold War.

As in the legacy of nuclear waste materials at sites throughout the United States (and Europe and Asia too, for that matter) as a result of the nation’s military defense buildup.

There was a time when it was primarily a defense story, a national security story. Or perhaps also a foreign affairs/foreign policy story.

In the late 1990s, and well into the future it appears, it increasingly will be in the environmental beat that the story falls.

Therefore the opportunity. And the challenge.

Make that challenges. And lots of them.

Reporters might see the nuclear waste storage, transportation, and disposal story as being as remote and as far-removed as the decades, and even centuries, it will take for much of that waste to decay or reach its “half-life.” They might see the issue as being as remote in distance as are some of the projected disposal sites: as far from readers and viewers in New York or Tacoma, for instance, as Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is from Carlsbad, New Mexico.

That would be a mistake.

Surely the long-term environmental, economic, and societal challenges arising from sound management and disposal of this Cold War nuclear legacy is a national story, indeed an international story. Make no mistake about that.

But with temporary above-ground sites peppering the map, and with transportation corridors lacing across thousands of miles of interstate highways stretching from Washington State to South Carolina and from Ohio to California, it’s also a uniquely local story in many regions of the country.

For enterprising environmental journalists, there’s also lots of new ground to plow. No pun.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) that is the subject of this guide is planned to be the first permanent repository of transuranic waste, just one of the Cold War waste streams that will command public interest and attention in coming decades. Careful journalists will be quick to recognize the differences among various Cold War nuclear wastes. But they also will recognize potential precedential implications of activities associated with transuranic waste–the first type expected to begin the transition from “temporary” to “permanent” storage.

That in itself will help make the WIPP transuranic waste story newsworthy. (Will the time come when reporters will want to add those terms–WIPP and transuranic waste–to their hard-disk spell-checker dictionaries?)

It may be a tad presumptuous to suggest that the West–or for that matter anyone really–actually won the Cold War. But in that context and by some reverse logic, one could reasonably conclude that having won the war, there now remain numerous, and complex, “battles” still to be fought and won.

It’s like having to deal with scattered and random land mines long after the peace treaty has been signed.

Few ever thought that either the build-up or the eventual build-down of the nuclear weapons stockpile would pose easy public policy questions, ripe for simplified decision making. And no one should suggest either that the costly and complex processes of managing that stockpile will be without its own twists and turns.

Helping citizens better understand and effectively become involved with that decision making is a role, and an opportunity, the press alone can fulfill. If this reporter’s guide helps citizens reach that goal, it will have accomplished its most ambitious hopes. And then some.

Bud Ward
Executive Director, Environmental Health Center
National Safety Council

September 1997