BRC report continues shameful history of targeting Native American communities for radioactive waste dumps

Grace Thorpe helped stop dozens of radioactive waste dumps targeted at Native American communities by DOE's Nuclear Waste NegotiatorToday's final report by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC) continued the shameful history of the U.S. nuclear establishment, in both government and industry, of targeting Native American communities for radioactive waste dumps. Beyond Nuclear issued a media statement regarding the BRC report today, and an op-ed several days ago. At the very first public meeting of the BRC nearly two years ago, Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps pleaded this environmental injustice be stopped. To the contrary, BRC's final report points to the U.S. Department of Energy's "Nuclear Waste Negotiator" as a model to be followed again now to advance "consolidated interim storage sites" and repositories. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, DOE's Nuclear Waste Negotiator contacted every single federally recognized Native American tribe in the United States, then targeted 60 in particular, focusing in the end on Mescalero Apache, New Mexico. It is a testament to the extraordinary efforts of Native American environmental justice activists like Grace Thorpe that all those proposals were defeated, and the Nuclear Waste Negotiator's program eliminated. The nuclear power  utilities picked up where the Negotiator left off, next targeting Skull Valley Goshutes, Utah -- a struggle that continues. Ironically, President Obama praised Grace Thorpe in his "Women Taking the Lead to Save our Planet" Women's History Month Proclamation on March 3, 2009, for launching "a successful campaign to organize Native Americans to oppose the storage of nuclear waste on their reservations" -- only now to have his own DOE's BRC recommend that the Nuclear Waste Negotiator model be revived,  including to re-target Native American communities for radioactive waste dumps.