"Consent-Based Siting" -- DOE Floats "Funding Opportunity" for Dump Hosts
(Just counting the Private Fuel Storage, LLC (targeted at the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah) consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) environmental review public comment proceedings (late 1990s/early 2000s), the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (2010-2012) public comment sessions, DOE's previous "Consent-Based Siting" public comment proceeding (2015-2017), and the current round of CISF targeting (Interim Storage Partners in Texas, Holtec in New Mexico) NRC environmental review public comment proceedings (2017-2021), our side has likely submitted more than 100,000 public comments opposed to CISFs! But, here we go again...
Energy Secretary Granholm (who has also just floated the dangerous idea of undoing the hard-won agreement to shut down the faultline-surrounded Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant by 2025) has pulled the trigger. In a press release, Fed. Reg. Notice, and web post, the Department of Energy published its long-threatened, so-called "Consent-Based Siting" Request for Information. Earlier this year, Granholm explicitly targeted Native American tribal governments, mentioning "a funding mechanism" if they would consider hosting "interim storage" for highly radioactive wastes.* This, despite DOE's own infamous environmental racism along these very lines in the past, and the Biden administration's oft-repeated, supposed commitment to environmental justice. Meanwhile, we and our grassroots allies across the country will continue to resist consolidated interim storage facilities already licensed in (Interim Storage Partners, Texas), or long targeted at (Holtec, New Mexico), low-income, people of color communities.
[*As Keith Lewis, environmental director for the Serpent River (Ojibwe) First Nation near Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada, is quoted in This Is My Homeland: Stories of the Effects of Nuclear Industries by People of the Serpent River First Nation and the North Shore of Lake Huron (edited by Keith Lewis, Lorraine Rekmans, and Anabel Dwyer; published by Serpent River First Nation, 1998 & 2003) --
“There is nothing moral about bribing a starving man with money.”
He was speaking about the harm done to his First Nation, and its homeland, by the offer of uranium mining and milling jobs beginning in 1948, and ending altogether by 1996.]
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