Great Lakes United
West Valley Nuclear Wastes
June, 2004

Whereas the West Valley, New York nuclear waste site has large inventories of long-lasting, intensely radioactive high-level and so-called "low-level" nuclear wastes from nuclear power, weapons, and other sources buried in trenches, holes and tanks upstream of Lake Erie and

Whereas West Valley is not a suitable place for permanent disposal of radioactive waste because of erosion and

Whereas the Department of Energy (DOE) is attempting to change its regulations to declassify high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) to "waste incidental to reprocessing," to allow for its abandonment in the ground in Idaho, South Carolina, Washington, and New York and

Whereas Natural Resources Defense Council, with the support of numerous affected state governments, successfully sued DOE in federal court for violating the Nuclear Waste Policy Act's requirement that DOE manage HLRW from reprocessing irradiated fuel and

Whereas DOE successfully lobbied to insert language into the Fiscal Year 2005 Department of Defense Authorization Bill that would allow DOE to abandon HLRW in storage tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and

Whereas such abandonment of HLRW in storage tanks would likely doom nearby groundwater and surface waters to eventual massive radioactive contamination and

Whereas such radioactive contamination would be catastrophic for public health and the environment both on-site and downstream and

Whereas such a change to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act would legalize the abandonment of HLRW and set a dangerous national precedent that DOE would likely apply to the HLRW tanks at West Valley, New York, and

Whereas, if abandoned, much of the West Valley radioactive waste would eventually erode into adjacent waterways that flow into Lake Erie, Niagara Falls, Lake Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River, affecting both Canada and the United States,

Therefore be it resolved that Great Lakes United urges the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to disapprove DOE's attempts to declassify HLRW as "waste incidental to reprocessing" and abandon it on-site and

Be it also resolved that Great Lakes United supports the exhumation and containment of the West Valley nuclear waste.

I HEREBY CERTIFY THAT THIS IS A TRUE COPY OF A RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY GREAT LAKES UNITED AT THE JUNE 6, 2004 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING IN NORTH EAST, PENNSYLVANIA.

________________________
Loretta Michaud, Secretary

Great Lakes United is a coalition of 160 community-based and regional environmental and conservation organizations in 9 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces devoted to protecting the environment of the Great Lakes ecosystem.