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In a bit of good news for the environment, work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York's Upper Hudson River. But there's also some bad news -- which is that the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas. "This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another," said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter. "We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses."

"Thirty years ago, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board selected Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the nation's only permanent storage site for the radioactive waste from our nuclear power plants. Work proceeded during this period to secure walls and ceilings from possible earthquakes, paving interior roads and installing more extensive infrastructure. All of this added up to expenditures of $10 billion. This past March, the U.S. Energy Department notified the board they intended to abandon the Yucca site because it was "too small." This must be government at its worst. An Energy Department spokeswoman said that the president was establishing a blue-ribbon commission to find a "safe, long term solution" within 18 months."

"One of my happiest memories as a young boy was going duck hunting with Dad. On the way to the hunt, even in the dark, by the moonlight you could see the beauty of the West Tennessee countryside. We would drive by small communities and through towns where business owners soon would be getting ready for a day of commerce. If you had told me then that the day would come that an outside company and nameless, faceless federal bureaucrats would threaten that beauty and our communities by trying to make West Tennessee a nuclear waste dump I would have thought you were crazy. Today, that nightmare is on the verge of reality as plans are being laid to move hundreds of jobs from Milan, Tenn., to Middletown, Iowa, and to convert the Milan facility to the demilitarization and storage of depleted uranium."