Nuclear Waste + Native Lands= Environmental Racism
Since the advent of the nuclear era, Native peoples have suffered disproportionately more than other populations from this atomic power and atomic energy technologies. Native peoples and territories have been contaminated with radiation from uranium mining and milling (such as the Serpent River First Nation on the North Shore of Lake Huron), atomic testing and in isolated communities like Point Hope, Alaska, have served as guinea pigs for the federal government in its radiation experiments. Now Native lands serve as potential sites for radioactive waste dumps.
Yucca Mountain: No Place for Nuclear Waste
Yucca Mountain, in the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation, is a place of deep spiritual significance to Shoshone and Pauite peoples. Despite this, the federal government plans to send there 98 percent of the radioactivity generated during the entire Nuclear Age, including the high-level nuclear waste generated at the U of M's research reactor. The Department of Energy (DOE) has already spent 5 billion dollars towards the project and wants to spend 50 billion more to complete it before the end of the decade.
The government has no right to use Yucca Mountain this way. Newe Sogobia —the land guaranteed the Western Shoshone Nation by treaty — includes Yucca Mountain. Even the mere study of the site is a violation of the treaty. The Shoshone people have made their wishes clear: they want the DOE off their land and their mountain restored to them.
Because of U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada, the Western Shoshone Nation is already the most bombed nation on earth. They suffer from widespread cancer, leukemia, and other diseases as a result of fallout from more than 1,000 atomic explosions on their territory.
More than 100 grassroots environmental groups, Native and non- Native, organized to gain broad participation in the Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process. But the vast majority of people who might be affected by this decision still are not aware of the danger. The Yucca Mountain EIS largely sidesteps the issue of transport.
90,000 shipments of high level waste designated for Yucca Mountain will be passing by the front yards of more than 50 million Americans along highways and train routes in 43 States. Obviously, the transport of this waste poses a huge public health risk. Even DOE studies anticipate several hundred accidents over the next thirty years, some of them severe. A single accident releasing radiation into the environment could cost tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up, and could kill and injure hundreds of people (according to Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates, a graduate of the University of Michigan nuclear science department).
In addition to illegal treaty violations and the possibility of a \\\\\\"mobile Chernobyl\\\\\\" while the waste is on the road, Yucca Mountain is simply not a safe repository for nuclear waste. According to the DOE study, at least one storage canister of the more than 10,000 canisters envisioned at Yucca will fail within the next thousand years. After 10,000 years, all the canisters may degrade, according to a report on the DOE proposal in The New York Times.
More than 621 earthquakes have been recorded in the area (at magnitudes of 2.5 on the Richter scale or higher) in the last twenty years alone. An earthquake at Yucca Mountain could cause groundwater to surge up into the storage area forcing dangerous amounts of plutonium into the atmosphere and contaminating the water supply. (Given this, it is not surprising that the nuclear industry has fought against any groundwater radiation standards for the facility — these standards could derail the entire project.)
As the federal EIS process grinds on, the industry is doing all they can to expedite and insure Yucca\\\\\\'s opening. Each year for the past six years, legislation has quietly appeared in Congress in a backroom effort by the industry to change current law and seal a Yucca deal.
This year\\\\\\'s proposed changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act pretty much \\\\\\"threw radiation standards out,\\\\\\" according to Michael Marriotte of the Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) in Washington, D.C., going so far as to strip the EPA of authority for setting standards. All this, says NIRS, is to \\\\\\"make the Yucca shoe fit\\\\\\" and insure the production of more nuclear waste.
On April 25, 2000, President Clinton did the right thing and vetoed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act as he promised. A Senate vote to override the veto on May 2nd failed by a narrow margin. So, for one more year, the Western Shoshone, Yucca Mountain, and fifty million Americans are safe from the nuclear industry. But what about next year?
Join the call for \\\\\\"No Nuclear Waste on Native Lands\\\\\\". See below for how to take action.
Nuclear Politics and Environmental Injustice
Every single proposal to store high level nuclear waste in North America targets Native territories. Not only do these proposals represent immense environmental injustices toward Native peoples, but the dumps, if authorized, will enable a dying nuclear industry to get some last breaths.
Nuclear waste is the Achilles heel of the industry. Reactors are filling up with spent radioactive fuel and there is no safe place to put this deadly waste. Utilities will have to close down their plants if they cannot get a waste site authorized. The industry sees this as a political problem, not an environmental one. Targeting isolated and economically disenfranchised Indians is their one solution. Help us close this loophole. Join the movement to stop nuclear waste on Native lands and create the impetus for our society to move towards wind, solar and other renewable resources.
Utilities Target Skull Valley Goshutes in Utah for Radioactive Dump
A coalition of eight powerful utilities is desperately trying to construct a radioactive waste dump on the remote Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in Utah. A handful of brave and committed tribal members are resisting in an effort to protect what remains of their ancestral lands.
Impatient about the slow progress of the Yucca Mountain Project, the utility companies have incorporated as a Limited Liability Corporation called Private Fuel Storage (PFS) and are moving full steam ahead to license and construct a privately owned, \\\\\\"interim,\\\\\\" dump at Skull Valley by 2002. The eight utilities participating in the project, led by Minnesota-based Northern States Power, include Con-Edison, GPU Nuclear, Southern Nuclear Operating Company, American Electric Power (owner of the Cook nuclear reactors in southwest Michigan) and other industry giants.
Their strategy is simple: use unlimited amounts of money to buy out any potential opposition to locate a dump on the reservation. Last year, PFS entered into an undisclosed monetary agreement with resistant local cattle ranchers, and in May, signed a pay-off deal with the County in exchange for support of the dump. In an area that is economically sparse, money talks loudly. \\\\\\"It\\\\\\'s pretty clear that utilities are willing to spend billions to move the spent fuel out of their back yard into ours,\\\\\\" said Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, who opposes the project.
If complete, the waste storage would take up to 4,000 casks, or 40,000 metric tons, of high-level wastes transported from all over the U.S. by railroads and highways. As a Limited Liability Corporation, none of the individual utilities would be liable for an accident either on the road or at the site. The casks of spent fuel would sit above-ground, in a parking-lot-type facility until a permanent federal repository is supposedly constructed at Yucca Mountain.
Skull Valley is located about 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. Only about 30 tribal members live on the reservation. Their land-base is already surrounded by toxic industries, including biological and chemical weapons plants and incinerators, an aluminum chloride plant deemed the worst single air polluter in the country, and a low-level radioactive waste dump. Adding high-level nuclear waste to this toxic mix would be the final nail in the coffin for the traditional culture of the Skull Valley Goshutes.
Please take action. Here is a sample letter you can write to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
____________________________________________
The Honorable Richard Meserve
Chairman
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, D.C. 20555
Dear Mr. Meserve,
The targeting of economically and politically vulnerable Native American communities for nuclear waste dumps is an egregious form of environmental racism. I urge you to deny the license for the proposed Private Fuel Storage high-level nuclear waste dump on the reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians in Utah, as it represents a violation of President Clinton's commitment to environmental justice.
Sincerely,
___________________________________________
For more information or to get more involved, please contact:
Faye Brown, Honor the Earth, 2641 38th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55406
ph. 612.278.7165, contact@honorearth.org, www.honorearth.com
Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Information & Resource Service, 1424 16th St. NW, Suite 404, Washington, D.C. 20036; ph. 202.328.0002, kevin@nirs.org, www.nirs.org
Corbin Harney, Shundahai Network, 5007 Elmhurst Lane, Las Vegas, NV 89108-1304;
ph. 702.647.3095, shundahai@shundahai.org, www.shundahai.org
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