Stop Radioactive Racism! Last chance to sign anti-PFS letter; Letter to Editor campaign to local papers
*If your group has not yet signed onto the letter opposing PFS, go to www.nirs.org/radwaste/scullvalley/svgoshutesgrltr3142005.htm to review the letter and groups already signed on, then email ASAP your personal name, title if any, group name, city and state to kevin@nirs.org to be added to the letter.*
*Write a Letter to the Editor to your local paper. Use the fact sheets below to compose your own letter for your local paper.
Culminating an eight year long process, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB), the adjudicatory arm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), approved a preliminary license for Private Fuel Storage (PFS) on May 24, rejecting Utah's motion for reconsideration and paving the way for the NRC Commissioners to consider the matter. The Commissioners are expected to approve the project quickly, perhaps within days or weeks. PFS hopes to open its doors to high-level radioactive waste from any commercial reactor in the U.S. by 2007, meaning Mobile Chernobyls could begin rolling through most states and hundreds of major population centers in less than two years. Go to http://www.ewg.org/reports/nuclearwaste/find_address.php and type in your address to see how close you are to Yucca Mountain, Nevada-bound high-level radioactive waste truck and train routes (rail routes to PFS would be similar, even identical, throughout much of the country).
PFS is the proposal made by eight commercial nuclear utilities to build and operate a "temporary" commercial high-level radioactive waste dump on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. On April 4, Public Citizen and Nuclear Information and Resource Service hosted a briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. regarding Private Fuel Storage - laying out the reasons why the project is unnecessary, irresponsible, and unethical. The State of Utah made oral arguments to the ASLB the very next day, April 5th, urging the Board to reconsider its Feb. 24th preliminary license approval.
PFS will not reduce the risks posed by high-level radioactive waste even temporarily. Waste will always remain on-site at operating reactors, and by transporting it and storing it aboveground in yet another part of the country, PFS will just make the existing problem worse. The "temporary" nature of PFS is also questionable, as this aspect of the project is completely dependent on the opening of Yucca Mountain, which has been beset with problems, and may very well never open.
Public Citizen and NIRS recently published a number of fact sheets and timelines on the problems with PFS. Please go to http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_waste/hi-level/fuel/ for a backgrounder on PFS, explanation of why it is neither necessary or responsible, and presentation of the reasons as to why this dump is all of a sudden on the fast track towards approval (namely, the nuclear power industry's need for the "illusion of a solution" to the nuclear waste problem in order to justify the building of new reactors).
There are also two timelines related to the unethical nature of the project, the first showing how scores of Native American tribes have been targeted for high-level radioactive waste dumps since 1987, and the second how the Skull Valley Goshutes in particular have come so close now to actually being the first tribe to be dumped on. This PFS/Skull Valley Goshutes timeline also raises significant questions about the legitimacy of the lease agreement between the tribe and the nuclear utility consortium comprising PFS, the supposed legal basis for the entire proposal.
Further background and history can be found at the NIRS website section http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/scullvalley/skullvalley.htm, and a summary fact sheet entitled "Environmental Racism, Tribal Sovereignty, and Nuclear Waste" is at http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pfsejfactsheet.htm.
The ASLB decision should soon be available on the NRC website, and in the meantime, we have a PDF copy we can email upon request.
If we can answer any questions, please just let us know.
Together, we can and must stop this radioactive racism in its tracks!
Sincerely,
Kevin Kamps,
Nuclear Information and Resource Service,
kevin@nirs.org,
www.nirs.org,
202.328.0002 ext. 14
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