News coverage of the DOE's "Consent-Based Siting" public meeting in Chicago

A rusted chain secures a gate to the shuttered Zion Nuclear Power Station along the shore of Lake Michigan March 11, 2009 in Zion, Illinois. About 1,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel is stored on the property due in part to a lack of permanent storage. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)Kari Lydersen of Midwest Energy News reported on the meeting. She quoted Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps:

During the public comment period, Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog of the anti-nuclear organization Beyond Nuclear, argued that Native American leaders have been offered financial incentives in an effort to coerce them to accept radioactive waste.

“I begged and pleaded with the Blue Ribbon commission, do not target Native American tribes again for these dumps,” said Kamps. “This is an environmental injustice, this is radioactive racism.”

See comprehensive documentation of this targeting of Native Americans for radioactive waste dumps, at:

http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/scullvalley/skullvalley.htm

See particularly the NIRS-Public Citizen white paper on "Radioactive Racism: The History of Targeting Native American Communities with High-Level Atomic Waste Dumps."

Yucca Mountain, Nevada -- long targeted by the nuclear establishment for dumping of the country's high-level radioactive wastes -- is also located on Western Shoshone Indian land. They do not consent. (See NIRS Yucca Mountain website section, as well as Beyond Nuclear's).

The radioactive waste dump targeted at the Great Lakes shore, at Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada, is also on Saugeen Ojibwe Nation (SON) lands. SON does not consent. (See Beyond Nuclear's Canada website sub-section for updates.)

But such radioactive racism is not limited to high-level radioactive waste dumps. Uranium mining and milling is often targeted at indigenous peoples' lands. So too are other nuclear activities -- such as the operation of two reactors, and storage of high-level radioactive waste, on the land of the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota.)

Jeff McMahon also reported on the Chicago meeting at Forbes.

See the photo that was run with the Forbes article, above. Whether due to graffiti, as here, or rust, etc., warning signs that are illegible are an example of "loss of institutional control" over forever deadly high-level radioactive waste (not to mention rusty, flimsy chains on gates!). In this case at Zion, that has happened within years, let alone thousands of millenia (the U.S. EPA, under court order, has acknowledged a million years of hazard related to high-level radioactive waste, as codified in its Yucca Mountain dump regulations; this however fails to account for such radioactive poisons as I-129, which has 157 to 314 million years of hazard). Zion is located on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, about 30 miles north of Chicago, near the Wisconsin state line. Lake Michigan, as a headwaters of the Great Lakes, is the drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream, in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a large number of Native American First Nations. DOE, in its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Yucca dump (Feb. 2002) warned that abandonment of irradiated nuclear fuel at nuclear power plant sites would result in catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity into the environment over long enough periods of time, as dry cask storage containers failed for lack of maintenance.

However, this is no reason to rush into Mobile Chernobyl shipments targeted at Native American reservations. Such Floating Fukushimas would travel on the waters of Lake Michigan itself. High-level radioactive waste trucks and trains would travel through the heart of downtown Chicago, within a quarter-mile of the Art Institute. Such risks cannot be rushed into. (See NIRS' "Stop Fukushima Freeways" website sub-section, as well as Beyond Nuclear's Waste Transportation website sub-section, for more information.)

In the interim, hundreds of groups, representing all 50 states, have long called for Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS), to secure and safeguard the wastes where they currently are -- and inevitably will remain for decades to come (DOE has admitted, in its Yucca dump FEIS, that it would take 25 to 50 years simply to move the wastes from reactor sites to a dump-site). HOSS would serve as an interim measure, until safe, secure, and socially acceptable away-from-reactor sites can be identified, transport containers and regulations significantly strengthened (rather than weakened!), etc. But calls for HOSS have fallen on deaf ears, at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, DOE, Capitol Hill, White House, Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, etc.

And of course, calls for permanent shutdowns of reactors -- and thus the cessation of waste generation -- are growing louder and louder, not just in the U.S., but worldwide.

For more information about this Chicago meeting, see Beyond Nuclear's announcement, as well as report back from the break out sessions, and notes from the overall event.