Speak Out on Yucca Mountain

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Eleven, Number Four
May/June 2002

Call to Action:

The nuclear industry and the Bush Administration want to turn Yucca Mountain, Nevada — a highly seismic mountain — into a high-level radioactive waste dump. Yucca Mountain is on Indian land — land guaranteed the Western Shoshone Nation in a treaty of peace and friendship. The mountain is sacred to the original peoples of Nevada.

Kenny Guinn, Governor of the US State of Nevada, delivered his veto of President Bush's decision to proceed with nuclear waste dumping in Yucca Mountain to Washington DC on 9 April. It is the first time in US history that a state governor has vetoed a decision by a president. It was made possible by a unique 1982 federal law on nuclear waste disposal. The US Senate and House of Representatives have 90 legislative days in which to confirm or override Guinn's veto.

In order to muster as much public opposition to the dump as possible, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), along with Public Citizen and a coalition of grassroots groups, is organizing a grand mock nuclear waste cask tour for the late spring/early summer. Full-scale replica atomic waste transport containers will hit the road, visiting dozens of key states in the Congressional battle, educating the public that atomic trains and trucks — by the tens of thousands — are heading their way, unless they act now to stop them in their tracks. The mock casks will form a convoy, warning communities that if the Yucca Mountain dump opens, six irradiated fuel shipments per day for 30 years would travel US roads and rails. These casks are vulnerable to accidents and attack. Both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Congress-created Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board have refused to support the Department of Energy's opinion that the Yucca Mountain waste disposal site is safe. The GAO recommended that a decision to bury waste there should be postponed indefinitely.

Although the House likely will override the governor's veto, pro-dump forces will face a tougher job in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where Senator Harry Reid from Nevada is the Assistant Majority Leader. Reid is opposed to the dump.

Contact your members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Yucca Mountain dump and the "Mobile Chernobyl" shipments it would launch. Phone the US Capitol Switchboard at 202/ 224-3121 to be put through to your senators and representative, or write:

The Honorable (full name) US Senate; Washington, DC 20510; or The Honorable (full name), US House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515. Sample letter can be found at www.nirs.org