Standing in solidarity against dirty energy

TransCanada Pipelines, which wants to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline across multiple U.S. states, for shipping dirty tar sands crude oil for export overseas, is also a major nuclear power utility. It owns a large share of Bruce Power, operator of the largest operating nuclear power plant in the world (the Japanese competition at Kashiwizaki-Kariwa is currently idled) -- Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, on the Lake Huron shoreline of Ontario, 50 miles from Michigan's Thumb.

Among the crazy, dangerous ideas Bruce Nuclear is pushing are: shipping 64 giant, radioactive steam generators, by boat on the Great Lakes, across the Atlantic, to Sweden, for "recycling" into consumer products; and hosting a "Deep Geologic Repository" for all of Ontario's so-called "low" and intermediate level radioactive waste (from 20 reactors), less than a mile from the drinking water supply for 40 million people in 8 U.S. states, 2 Canadian provinces, and a large number of Native American/First Nations. TransCanada's Bruce Nuclear didn't get away with the former; but the fight is still on against the latter.

Another crime against health and the planet that Bruce Nuclear engages in is incineration of all of Ontario's "low" level radioactive waste, imported from 20 reactors, with untold radioactive releases into the environment. It's the radioactive ashes leftover that Ontario Power Generation wants to bury along the Lake Huron shore at TransCanada's Bruce Nuclear Generating Station.

TransCanada's Bruce Nuclear is also a shameless opponent to any competition from wind power or solar photo-voltaics.

Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps will join with Reject and Protect/Cowboy and Indian Alliance (see photo, above left, showing the Cowboy and Indian Alliance's horseback arrival into D.C. on Earth Day!) opposing TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline on Saturday, April 26th on the National Mall in Washington. Another member of the very broad coalition of environmental allies who will be there is Honor the Earth and its director, Winona "No Nukes" LaDuke.

Kevin's placard will commemorate, on one side, the Enbridge oil pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River, just upstream from his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan in July 2010 (the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history, 1.4 million gallons of Canadian tar sands crude -- see Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage on the "Dilbit Disaster" (diluted bitumin, another name for tar sands crude oil) by Inside Climate News here); on the other side of the placard, it will commemorate the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe's 28-year mark (April 26, 1986 to April 26, 2014).

Along similar lines, Beyond Nuclear recently stood in solidarity with the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Citizen, more than a dozen other national groups, and scores of grassroots roots to protest the U.S. EPA's decision to allow BP to enter into federal contracts, despite the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, as well as a very recent Canadian tar sands crude oil spill into Lake Michigan from a notorious BP facility in Whiting, IN.