HELP STOP DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE SHIPMENTS ON MICHIGAN’S ROADS AND RAILS AND THE WATERS OF LAKE MICHIGAN!

Please help us stop the dangerous, expensive Yucca Mtn. nuclear waste dump plan before it starts. Call your U.S. Senators right away and urge them to vote against Yucca Mtn. and the Mobile Chernobyl it would launch onto our roads, rails, and waterways. The Yucca vote could happen as early as July 9 th.

Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at 202.224.3121 to be patched through to Sen. Stabenow and Sen. Levin’s D.C. offices. Tell the staff person you talk to that you want your Senator to vote against Yucca Mtn. and the high level radioactive waste shipments it would launch through Michigan’s major cities and onto Lake Michigan itself.

Call Kevin Kamps at NIRS at 202.224.3121 for more information. Thanks!

BACKGROUND:

The U.S. Senate will soon vote, perhaps in early July, on the Yucca Mountain proposal to open a national dumpsite in Nevada for 77,000 tons of high level nuclear waste from commercial reactors and military facilities across the country. This would require many tens of thousands of risky truck, train, and barge shipments through 46 states, including Michigan.

Michigan could have up to 1,728 truck shipments or 287 giant train shipments passing through most major cities [Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Saginaw, Bay City, Flint, Lansing, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo and many other communities]. The Dept. of Energy also proposes shipping 453 barges of high level nuclear waste on Lake Michigan, the source of drinking water for tens of millions of people. This means waste would roll right through people’s communities. To see how close it comes to your home, go to www.mapscience.org, and type in your address. For the vast majority of Michiganders, the Yucca plan would bring waste much closer to their homes than it is now.

These shipments would be vulnerable to severe accidents or terrorist attacks. The recent train derailment in Potterville, near Lansing, highlights the dangers. What if nuclear waste had been on that train? The hundreds of thousands of gallons of propane on board could have burned at a much higher temperature, and for a much longer duration, than nuclear waste transport containers are designed to withstand. The release of even a fraction of a cask’s contents would spell unprecedented catastrophe, a Mobile Chernobyl.

Yucca is merely the illusion of a solution. Waste would only begin leaving Michigan, in a trickle, in 2015. Any waste shipped out of the state would quickly be replaced on-site at the still operating reactors. Even if Yucca opens and fills up, there would still be high level nuclear waste on the Great Lakes shorelines for many decades to come. Yucca doesn’t solve that problem. It only throws good money after bad at a scientifically unsuitable site in Nevada, wasting tens of billions of dollars of ratepayer and taxpayer money that could otherwise be devoted to finding real solutions to the nuclear waste dilemma.

Please phone Michigan’s U.S. Senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow. Call during business hours, once per week until the vote. Sen. Stabenow’s D.C. number is 202.224.4822. Sen. Levin’s D.C. number is 202.224.6221. If you’d rather call the Senators’ local district offices nearest you, the numbers are [see directory].

Tell the staff person you talk to that you urge the Senator to vote against this dangerous and wasteful plan, and to stop the Yucca dump and the Mobile Chernobyl it would launch.

Activate your networks, call your friends and family, to do the same.

This vote has been 20 years in the making. We need to do all we can to stop Yucca Mtn. dead in its tracks on Capitol Hill.

Yucca is an active earthquake zone guaranteed to leak radioactivity into the drinking water supply below. Tens of thousands of risky truck, train and barge shipments through 46 states would be required. Transport containers are vulnerable to severe accidents and terrorist attacks. A release of even a fraction of the contents of a shipment could be catastrophic. What sense does it make to take all the risks of transport, when Yucca would not make the nuclear waste situation better, but worse: it’s guaranteed to leak!