What weighs thirty tons, has as much radiation as 200 Hiroshima bombs, and is projected to pass within a half mile of your home? That would be a canister of high level radioactive waste, traveling from one of the 109 aging nuclear power plants in this country to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the proposed "final resting place" for America's most deadly garbage.
The Department of Energy (DOE) released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a proposed Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain in August, 1999. It is to this mountain, at the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation, a place of deep spiritual significance to Shoshone and Pauite peoples, that the federal government hopes to send 98% of the burden of radioactivity generated during the entire Nuclear Age.
Despite heated criticism by Native and environmental forces, the Yucca Mountain proposal remains the only site under government study for the permanent disposal of high level nuclear waste. The Department of Energy has already dumped three billion dollars into the project and wants to spend 35 billion more to complete it. The release of the EIS marks another DOE step toward opening the dump by the projected completion date of 2010.
More than 200 grassroots groups--Native and non-Native--have been organizing to seek broad participation in the Environmental Impact Statement process. As a result, the rushed public comment period has been extended to the legal 180 day period but still severely limits the ability of the vast majority of impacted people to testify.
That's because the Yucca Mountain EIS largely sidesteps the issue of transport. High level waste designated for Yucca Mountain will be moving on American highways and train routes by the front yards of more than 50 million Americans. The transportation of this waste poses a huge public health risk. DOE studies project a rate of one accident per 343 shipments. That translates into, at the very minimum, 268 accidents over the next thirty years as up to 90,000 shipments of nuclear waste make their way to Yucca Mountain.
The hearings, which began on September 27, 1999, and continue through January, 2000, now include eight Nevada towns, one community each in Idaho, Utah, Missouri, Colorado, California, Georgia, and a hearing in Washington, DC. Those hearing sites will not allow easy access for communities in forty-three other states who are endangered by the transportation proposals. Shoshone and anti-nuclear organizers are urging people to attend the hearings, send in written comments to the DOE, and request hearings in their impacted areas.
The Shoshone are also asking people to support Native land rights issues raised by the EIS. What is continually glossed over by the decision makers and ignored in the EIS is the fact that Newe Sogobia, land guaranteed the Western Shoshone Nation by treaty, includes Yucca Mountain. Even study of the site is a violation of the treaty. The Shoshone want the DOE off their land and their mountain restored to them. Upholding the treaty can be an important political and legal tool for organizers to stop the dump, but the Shoshone face extreme geographic and political isolation; without sufficient public support, they fear their voice will not be heard. That isolation is reflected in a statement by Rep. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina: "God made Yucca Mountain for the express purpose of storing high level nuclear waste. There's nothing within 100 miles of the place." Add racism to low level logic and you get a high level waste dump.
Perhaps as alarming as the absence of transportation issues and a concern for justice are the obscured health considerations in the EIS. According to the DOE study, the steel canisters buried in Yucca Mountain will eventually leak. The DOE is planning to store more than 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground. At least one storage canister of the more than 10,000 canisters envisioned would fail within the next thousand years. And after 10,000 years, according to a New York Times report on the DOE proposal, all of the canisters may degrade.
What may be worse is that an earthquake at Yucca Mountain could cause groundwater to surge up in the storage area forcing dangerous amounts of plutonium into the atmosphere and contaminating the water supply. This is not an unlikely scenario given that the area is a seismic minefield. More than 621 earthquakes have been recorded in the area at a magnitude of 2.5 or higher in the last twenty-some years. It is not surprising that the nuclear industry has fought heavily against any groundwater radiation standards for the facility, saying it could threaten the entire project.
According to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1992, radiation standards for the facility would need to be set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has proposed a standard of fifteen millirem per year as the exposure limit for people living near the site--a standard which, according to environmental groups, is inadequate for the protection of human health. EPA also suggests only a 10,000 year compliance period for the standards, while the DOE estimates the peak dose of radiation will occur 300,000 years after the waste if stored. "The Yucca Mountain Environmental Impact Study simply does not allow for the development of a repository that insures containment from the biosphere over the required period of time," states George Crocker, an energy policy activist of 25 years and Director of the Prairie Island Coalition in Minnesota.
Shoshone groups are adamant that any additional radiation risk to their community is unacceptable. The Shoshone Nation is already the most bombed nation on earth and suffers from widespread cancer, leukemia, and other disease as a result of fallout from more than 600 atomic explosions in their territory. To add to this risk is outlandish injustice.
In the meantime, pending legislation before Congress to rewrite the Nuclear Waste Policy Act would strip the EPA of all authority to set any standards at Yucca Mountain. Government and industry changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (appearing each session before Congress as a bad sequel and defeated now five years in a row) pretty much "throw radiation standards out," according to Micheal Marriot of the Nuclear Information Resource Service in Washington, DC. Such legislation would miraculously overcome most of the public health hurdles to the Yucca Mountain project with the stroke of a pen.
1999's revision of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act also dangerously allows on-site storage of nuclear waste outside power plans until Yucca Mountain or an "interim" dump site is ready. That "interim dump" may be on a Utah reservation (Skull Valley Goshute land) if the industry has its way. The on-site storage authorization is handy for utilities who don't want to have to fight citizen groups about turning their nuclear reactors into de-facto nuclear waste lots. The bill also provides for the federal government (meaning taxpayers) to take ownership of the waste and liability for it. What this means is that the utilities, as might be expected, will be abdicating responsibility for waste they created over the past thirty years. Summarizing the legislation, Crocker states that "It's the latest in a long line of stop gap measures by the industry to continue operations and accommodate the production of more nuclear waste--despite the fact that the industry doesn't know how to deal with the waste it has."
As the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1999 is metamorphosing in Congress, electrical utility industry contributions to elected officials are turning into policy. Over the past few years, the members of the Nuclear Energy Institute, i.e. your utilities, have anted up, sending about $12.8 million to their congressional delegations to try to assure pro-nuclear law and an end to their nuclear waste dilemma.
In short, this fall's hearings and what occurs in Congress affect far more people than those living in Nevada. If you'd like to put in your two cents' worth, an amount likely far less than those utility bills you presently pay, send your comments to the Department of Energy and Congress so that those fifty million people within a half mile of those transport routes and the Natives peoples endangered by these proposals might get to have a say.
Send your comments about Yucca Mountain to: Bill Richardson, US Department of Energy, Washington, DC 20009. Be sure to request a hearing in your community, if one is not scheduled.
Winona LaDuke, an internationally acclaimed Native American activist, founded the White Earth Recovery Project and the Indigenous Women's Network, and participates in the Honor the Earth campaign ([email protected], www.honorearth.com). The author of All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (South End Press, 1999), Last Standing Woman (Voyageur Press, 1997), and many articles on indigenous and environmental issues, she was also Ralph Nader's vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 US presidential elections. An Anishinaabe, she lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Winter 2000
Volume 9, Number 3
Human Time, Natural Time