St. Joseph, Michigan Ten demonstrators arrested last August at American Electric Company’s Cook nuclear station in Bridgman are to stand trial January 30th at the Berrien County Courthouse. The non-violent civil disobedience action, for which the ten are charged with trespassing, culminated a week-long Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp. This second annual event called for the shutdown of the Cook reactors for safety and environmental justice reasons. The ten, representing public interest and safe energy organizations from across the Midwest and the nation, are expected to plead “not guilty” to the charges and request a jury trial.
“The Cook nuclear reactors are still dangerous and should be permanently shut down,” said Kevin Kamps, an organizer of the Action Camp and participant in the civil disobedience action. “Revelations that Cook’s emergency cooling and containment systems might not operate in the event of an accident led to the three year shutdown of the reactors. But now the reactors have restarted, despite ongoing revelations of flaws in the safety control and containment systems.”
“The 15th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe this April serves as a reminder that countless thousands could be injured or killed if radiation escapes the reactors, which may explain why individuals from Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and beyond were willing to face arrest to call attention to this grave threat,” added Kamps.
The Kalamazoo, Michigan based Chernobyl Children’s Project brought visually-impaired child victims of the Soviet nuclear disaster to the first Action Camp in 1999.
The ten to stand trial represent the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, the national Nuclear Information & Resource Service based in Washington, D.C., the Chernobyl Children’s Project of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Illinois Peace Action, and the Nuclear Energy Information Service based in Evanston, Illinois. These groups, plus others from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and Ontario comprise the Nuclear-Free Great Lakes coalition that organizes the annual Action Camp.
Over 100 Camp participants rallied at both Consumers Energy’s Palisades nuclear reactor near South Haven and the Cook reactors in Bridgman last August 24th, calling attention to accident dangers and the generation of persistently harmful radioactive waste.
“AEP is a leader of the Private Fuel Storage consortium, which seeks to dump high-level nuclear waste from across the nation on the tiny Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Utah, an impoverished community already surrounded by hazardous facilities and toxic dumps,” said Kamps. “Palisades’ overflowing high-level waste could be among the first to be shipped there as early as 2003, but people across the country are rising up to put a stop to such immoral environmental racism.”
The ten defendants will be represented by attorneys David Zoglio of Lansing, Michigan and Mr. Kary Love of Holland, Michigan. Love similarly represented concerned citizens of Michigan one year ago in their request for an injunction against the U.S. Department of Energy, which conducted a highly controversial truck shipment of experimental nuclear weapons plutonium fuel to a reactor in Ontario which passed through Indiana and Michigan along Interstate 94.