House Yucca Mountain Advocate Retiring, Exiting Nuke Waste Fight
As reported by KNPR's SON ("State of Nevada").
U.S. Representative John Shimkus (Republican-Illinois), a longtime advocate for the Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump targeting Western Shoshone Indian land in Nevada, has announced he will retire after this congressional session. In this interview, he, unsurprisingly given his past behavior for decades, continues to spew deceptions and falsehoods.
He states "We stand on current law." What he meant is, the Yucca dump is the law of the land. Even that is untrue. But what about the "peace and friendship" Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, signed by the U.S. government with the Western Shoshone? As Native Community Action Council secretary, and Western Bands of Shoshone Indians principal man, Ian Zabarte, reminds Americans, treaties are the supreme law of the land, equal in stature to the U.S. Constitution itself. Members of Congress like John Shimkus have taken an oath of office, to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. How is Shimkus's utter disregard for the Treaty of Ruby Valley not an attack on law, and an undermining of the Constitution itself?!
Shimkus also states that Yucca Mountain is "federal property"...previously used for nuclear weapons testing. As made clear above, Yucca Mountain is not federal property. It is Western Shoshone Indian property, as made clear by the "peace and friendship" Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863. Also, the Nevada Test Site's nuclear weapons detonations took place tens of miles away from Yucca Mountain. To so flippantly lump the two locations together as one is deceptive. Besides that, the fact that the Western Shoshone, Nevadans, and other Downwinders have already suffered so much from nuclear weapons testing radioactive fallout, highlights the fact that now targeting Yucca Mountain as the national high-level radioactive waste dump, only compounds the environmental injustice of the past, adding insult to injury, and rubbing salt in the wounds.
He also states that the Yucca dump would be "safe for a million years." Yucca dump advocates like Shimkus used to state that the Yucca dump would be safe for ten thousand years, till an environmental coalition (NRDC, represented by senior attorney Geoff Fettus; Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS); Public Citizen; Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana; Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force; and Citizen Alert of Nevada) beat the U.S. EPA in court 15 years ago. Ten thousand years is not good enough, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 9, 2004. EPA was ordered back to the drawing board on its Yucca dump regulations. Four years later, in 2008, EPA announced its court-ordered revised regulation. EPA acknowledged a million years of hazard associated with the high-level radioactive wastes that would be buried at Yucca. And Yucca would NOT be safe for a million years. At about year 11,000 post-burial, the waste containers beneath Yucca would begin to fail massively, and leak their deadly contents into the groundwater. That groundwater flows to Amargosa Valley, NV, where it is used for drinking and irrigation water. It then flows to Death Valley, CA, where the Timbisha Shoshone Band depend upon it.
Shimkus also falsely states "of course we're not" going to haul nuclear waste down the Las Vegas Strip. But the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects has clearly documented that a rail route right through the heart of Las Vegas could well be used for large numbers of train shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, bound for Yucca Mountain. See this repository of decades of scholarship on the high risks of nuclear waste transportation, here. As the state agency's director, Robert Halstead, has stated in analysis of Shimkus's H.R. 2699, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, the incorporated "Sense of Congress" that highly radioactive wastes should not be hauled through Las Vegas, and that the U.S. Department of Energy should seek alternative routing, is unenforcable. There is not alternative routing in existence, so DOE could simply haul it through Las Vegas. As Halstead pointed out, if DOE could have avoided Vegas, they would have. But they can't, so they haven't.
See analyses of and commentary on H.R. 2699, by Robert Halstead, director, State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, from June 2019:
---U.S. House Subcommittee hearing testimony;
---Analysis of and commentary on H.R. 2699.
Doubling down on his false point that Vegas can and would be avoided by shipments, Shimkus states that Nevada has "wide open spaces," and that the "best routes for the State of Nevada" would be chosen. As Halstead and the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects has long documented, and challenged, the rail bypass required to avoid Vegas would be the largest rail construction in the U.S. in many long decades, and would cost billions of dollars. There is no guarantee whatsoever that Congress would appropriate so much funding.
In fact, the preferred route that DOE has chosen, for this railway, would pass through the Great Basin National Monument, including the large-scale landscape art entitled "City." And as made clear above, all of this targeted land belongs to the Western Shoshone by treaty.
Shimkus also pooh-poohed the high risks of nuclear waste transportation. He states "thousands of shipments [have taken place] over decades, without a spill or occurrence." To rebut this, please see Halstead's report from 1996, documenting 72 incidents involving irradiated nuclear fuel shipments:
Shimkus concludes, "I just want to go home and turn over this fight to the next generation." Opponents of the Yucca dump welcome Shimkus's retirement. And "the next generation," such as the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, and other youth climate activists, get environmental justice. The inherent environmental injustices of nuclear power make it a non-starter as a climate solution. So too do nuclear power's astronomical expense (and hence opportunity costs for genuine climate solutions, like renewables and efficiency), as well as its glacial slowness to deploy. And the Yucca Mountain dump scheme is part and parcel of the nuclear power industry's environmental injustice, environmental racism, and radioactive racism.
November 27, 2019