Radioactive Roads and Rails, MI-IL-IN-MO-NE-WY-UT-NV, July 3rd to August 6th, 2000

Daily Diary Entries written by Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Waste Specialist at Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and driver of the mock nuclear waste cask

Daily Diary Entry for Monday, July 3rd, 2000 -- The Kick-Off for our Cross-Country Tour

Our mock nuclear waste cask set out from the front entrance of the CookNuclear Power Plant, which days ago re-started its reactor after a three-year forced shut down due to severe safety violations. Just two weeks earlier, on June 19th, the Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Campaign and Nuclear Information & Resource Service held a protest rally at Cook. The demonstration marked the first day of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing hearings in Salt Lake City for the proposed "interim storage site" for high level nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian reservation in Utah. We flew an airplane banner overhead reading "Don't Cook Native Lands with Nuclear Waste Dumps!" Of course the mock cask was there as well. 50 protestors from multiple states were there with placards calling attention to American Electric Power's environmental racism in trying to dump these deadliest of poisons on a small, destitute indigenous community out West.

One placard carried the words of Keith Lewis, from the Serpent River First Nation (an Ojibwe community in Ontario on Lake Huron): "There is nothing moral about tempting someone who is starving with money." His own impoverished community had been "tempted" by uranium mining corporations from the 1950's to 1996. Now that the mines are all closed, his community is left with the poverty, as well as the health and environmental devastation from the massive radioactivity and toxic chemical contamination left in the mine tailings which blow with the wind and flow with the water.

Another placard read "Nuclear Waste: The Modern Day Small Pox Blanket"-- alluding to the early form of germ warfare practiced against Native Americans in North America. Why is it that both the proposed high level nuclear waste dumps in the U.S. -- the permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (Western Shoshone land) and the "interim storage site" at Skull Valley, Utah -- are targeted at Native American lands? Actually, during the late 1980's and early 90's, the U.S. Department of Energy had a long list of Native American tribes it was targeting for nuclear waste dumps and "tempting with money."

The first Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp in August 1999 targeted the Cook plant for permanent closure. Over 300 activists from 8 states and Canada came together, and 17 were arrested for a non-violent civil disobedience at Cook's front entrance. This August will mark the second annual Action Camp, again aimed at stopping Cook from generating any more nuclear waste. Prevention is the best medicine for curing the nuclear waste "crisis".

Diary Entry for Tuesday, the Fourth of July, 2000

Today the mock high-level nuclear waste cask took part in the annual 4th of July parade in Evanston -- hometown of Illinois' nuclear power watchdog group Nuclear Energy Information Service, our local host. Our "float" was situated right between two marching bands. An estimated

15,000 on-lookers got a good long look at our large-as-life warning about the Mobile Chernobyl. One of our signs read "36,300 More for Illinois," the number of projected shipments, reluctantly admitted to by the Department of Energy at the Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Statement public hearings in Chicago last February. Despite being one of the hardest hit states by high level nuclear waste transport, DOE had refused for months to schedule a hearing in Chicago, but citizen and finally Congressional pressure forced them to.

We had a surprise encounter with none other than Illinois' senior Democratic U.S. Senator Richard Durbin. Durbin cast a critical vote against the most recent incarnation of the Mobile Chernobyl bill in February, and cast a deciding vote to sustain President Clinton's veto of the

legislation in May. Durbin got a big kick out of the cask, as well as the bold headline on our Illinois specific Mobile Chernobyl informational hand out: "Durbin Was Right!" It was gratifying how many people watching the parade applauded our float, gave us the thumbs up,

or even cheered their approval. Seems that we're not alone in feeling that opposing the Mobile Chernobyl and Screw Nevada is indeed patriotic, and a stand to preserve our democracy against the big money corruption of the nuclear industry, its tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, lobbyists, and nationwide ad campaigns. Happy nuclear-free 4th of July!

Watch for more Radioactive Roads and Rails daily diary entries to come.

You can contact Kevin Kamps on his on-the-road cell phone at (202) 262-9518, or leave a message at his office voice mail at (202) 328-0002 and he will call you back as soon as possible.

"Where's Paul Revere When We Need Him?"

"The Atomic Trains Are Coming! The Atomic Trucks Are Coming!"

--the Radioactive Roads and Rails slogan--

"We want a non-violent, national citizen's revolt. We are not going to sit around and wait for

Senator Feingold and Senator McCain to pull our chestnuts out of the fire....This is a call to hope and action, a call to reclaim and reinvent democracy, a call to the hard work of reorganizing

ourselves into a broad national coalition, a call to populists, workers, progressives, and liberals to

reconstitute ourselves into a smashing new national force to end corporate rule."

-- activist Ronnie Dugger --