The United States today hosts 104 nuclear power plants. Thanks to the anti-nuclear movement, it is a far cry from the 1,000 nuclear power plants the Nixon administration envisioned in 1974. Canada today hosts 22 Candu nuclear reactors, which provide 15 percent of Canadian electricity.
Much of the world’s nuclear industry has been sited on or near Native lands. Some 70 percent of the world’s uranium originates from Native communities, whether Namibia’s Rossing Mine, Australia’s Jabulikka Mine, Cluff Lake, or Rabbit Lake Mine (in Diné territory). Tletsoo, as uranium is known in Diné, comes from Native America.1
The Navajos ...were warned about the dangers of uranium. The people emerged from the third world into the fourth and present world and were...told to choose between two yellow powders. One was yellow dust from the rocks, and the other was corn pollen. The people chose corn pollen, and the gods nodded in assent. They also issued a warning. Having chosen the corn pollen, the Navajos were to leave the yellow dust in the ground. If it was ever removed, it would bring evil.
—Grace Thorpe,
founder of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans2
The nuclear reaction that releases so much power also creates profoundly hazardous wastes—compounds so dangerous to life forms that they must be isolated for 100,000 years. To date, 30,000 metric tons of nuclear waste have been generated by the U.S. nuclear industry. If today’s reactors are operational until the end of their licensing periods, the nuclear industry will have created 75,000 to 80,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. For this reason, among others, harnessing nuclear power was “a bad idea twenty years ago,” says longtime anti-nuclear activist Faye Brown. And “it’s still a bad idea now,” she says.3
There is pretty much no knowledge in the human repertoire on how to handle such long-lasting toxic substances, so industry relies on that old standby, computer projections, and counts on the Earth to take care of it.
As a result of this neglect, over 1,000 abandoned uranium mines lie on the Navajo reservation, largely untouched by any attempts to cover or cap or even landscape the toxic wastes.4 Vast areas of both the Spokane reservation in Washington State and the Yakama Reservation, which includes the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, have been contaminated with mine wastes and byproducts of the military’s nuclear experiments. Stretches of northern Canada from Ontario’s Serpent River to the Northwest Territories’ Baker Lake are inundated with radioactive waste, a legacy of decades of uranium mining and an absence of virtually any environmental regulation or protection.
The nuclear industry is perhaps the most highly subsidized industry in the United States. The federal government doled out some $97 billion in subsidies for the nuclear industry between 1948 and 1992, including over 65 percent of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) budget for research and development.5
“The utilities don’t care,” says Harvey Wasserman of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “They spent more than they were originally costed out. But they figured they would pass the price overruns on to the consumers.”6
The Nevada Test Site and the Western Shoshone
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission set up the Nevada Test Site within Western Shoshone territory as a proving grounds for nuclear weapons. Between 1951 and 1992, the United States and Great Britain exploded 1,054 nuclear devices above and below the ground. The radiation exposure emanating from these tests was only fully measured for 111 tests. Within just the first three years, 220 above-ground tests spewed fallout over a large area.7
The government maintained that the maximum radiation exposure from the tests was equivalent to that of a single chest x-ray. But in 1997, the National Cancer Institute made public a study of radiation exposure from above-ground nuclear tests that showed that some 160 million people had suffered significant radiation exposure from the tests, on average 200 times more than the amount indicated by the government. In some parts of the country, the exposure was found to be 2,000 to 3,000 times that amount.8
The institute estimated that as many as 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer may have been caused by atmospheric testing. Since the incidence of thyroid cancer is highly age-dependent and has a long latency period, children born prior to the 1950s—people in their 40s or 50s today—are still at risk. The radiation exposure is linked to other thyroid disorders, as well.9
None of that is news to Virginia Sanchez, a Western Shoshone woman who has grown up in the shadow of the Nevada Test Site. When the nuclear tests were exploded, “in school, [we would] duck and cover under the desk, not really understanding what it was.”10 Now she understands all too well. Sanchez lost her 36-year-old brother Joe to leukemia a few years back. Her grandfather died of bone cancer. She has seen the impact of the test site ravage her community.
In 1993, she began a new project at the Reno-based Citizens Alert Native American Program called Nuclear Risk Management for Native Communities. In that work, she began to grapple with what the federal government had done to her community.
According to Sanchez, the Atomic Energy Commission and then the Department of Energy would deliberately wait for the clouds to blow north and east before conducting above-ground tests, so that the fallout would avoid any heavily populated areas such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This meant that the Shoshones would get a larger dosage. They literally had no protection.
We weren’t wealthy, you know, our structures weren’t airtight. Besides, our people spent major amounts of time outside, picking berries, hunting, gathering our traditional foods.... At that time we still ate a lot of jackrabbits.... [In] Duckwater, which, as the crow flies, is 120 miles directly north of the test site, the people in that community didn’t have running water or electricity as a whole community until the early 1970s, so they would gather water outside.
And so, we received some major dosages of radiation. When the federal scientists began to look at the Department of Energy’s dose reconstruction of the off-site fallout, [they found that] we were put under the shepherd lifestyle. So we weren’t even looked at at all. The scientists...figured that a one-year-old child who ate a contaminated rabbit within a month’s time after the test probably had six times the dose of what DOE’s figures were saying.
Virginia recorded many stories that the federal agencies missed. People outside seeing the clouds coming over and gardens turning black. “People [were] working outside when the clouds went over. [There were stories of] getting sick with leukemia or doctors writing blisters off as some sunburn. There was a county school about three miles from the reservation, and all the kids wore the film badges [issued by federal officials to document the gamma rays], and they were never told the results.”
The Western Shoshone territory on which the test site resides consists of about 24.5 million acres of traditional homeland, as recognized in the 1853 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The government has for decades been trying to secure title to the Shoshone land. As Virginia explains it, in 1979, the Claims Commission recognized Shoshone title and offered to buy the land based on its 1873 value. “The traditional people blew apart the hearing,” Virginia says. The federal government awarded $26 million on behalf of the Shoshone, but has never been able to get the Shoshone to accept the money. The latest estimate of its accrued value is $91 million. So here we have some of the poorest people in the country who are refusing to accept a $91 million settlement for their land, because they want their land even if the federal government has put radiation on it. They want their land, and they want to heal their community.
Pressures Build to Dump on the Indians
In addition to the problem of already extant nuclear waste contamination, many of today’s American reactors have almost run out of space for their used fuel rods and their on-site waste. In the next decade most of the nation’s reactors will experience a shortfall in their space. This space “crisis” has pushed the discussion around handling nuclear wastes forward.
The growing environmental justice movement, coupled with the sovereign status of Indian lands and their frequent lack of infrastructure, mean that the nuclear industry has increasingly targeted Native lands for dumps. Besides that, by the 1990s, it had become “conveniently politically incorrect” to argue against a tribe’s autonomous decisionmaking, says Winnebago attorney Jean Belile of the Rocky Mountain Land and Water Institute.11
During the early and mid-1990s, the federal government and the nuclear industry offered seemingly lucrative deals to Native communities willing to accept nuclear waste dumps on their lands. A few big Native American organizations took the bait and worked on or at least provided the forum to discuss the dumping.
The federal Administration for Native Americans (ANA) and the Department of Commerce funded Indian consulting firms to promote the waste industry in Indian country. A big chunk of their money went to the Council on Energy Resource Tribes (CERT), an organization of 50 member tribes founded in 1975 to assert control over the development of Native mineral resources. In 1987, CERT received $2.5 million, over half of their total income, from federal nuclear waste contracts.
During the late 1980s, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) joined in nuclear waste research. Founded in 1944 to “work toward the promotion of the common welfare” of Native Americans, NCAI cooperated with the Department of Energy to ensure participation of Indian tribal governments in the siting and transportation of high-level nuclear waste.12 Between 1986 and 1990, NCAI received nearly $1 million, over one-fourth of their total income, from Department of Energy nuclear waste grants. In 1992, the DOE and NCAI signed a five-year cooperative agreement for $1.8 million. The NCAI’s nuclear waste program, initiated largely with federal funds, provided tribes with a steady stream of information on radioactive wastes.13
At a 1991 meeting of the NCAI, the Mescalero Apache Chairman explained that it was easy to get $100,000 by signing up for a grant for no-strings-attached research into the feasibility of siting a Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facility for nuclear waste on tribal lands. In 1992, the Mescalero Apache Tribe and CERT publicly advocated that Native communities host nuclear waste dump sites on their lands. Fourteen tribal councils, along with pro-nuclear government representatives and nuclear industry salespeople, attended the meeting.
That influential meeting was essentially about the philosophical underpinnings of hosting nuclear waste sites on Indian lands. David Leroy, DOE’s nuclear waste negotiator, aggressively courted tribes with nuclear waste proposals. According to Nilak Butler, a former Indigenous Environmental Network council member, Leroy and the DOE argued that Native responsibility to hold nuclear waste emanates from the “superior Native understanding of the natural world” and the fact that we are “our brother’s keeper.”14
Judy De Silva is a softspoken Ojibwe woman from the Grassy Narrows reserve in northern Ontario. The administrator of the band’s day-care program and mother of three young children, she is angry at the Canadian government’s mid-1990s announcement of a proposal to dump nuclear waste in her community.
“We’ve been through so much,” she said, sounding both disgusted and weary at the scope of the problems in small Grassy Narrows, a community of 500 residents 55 miles northeast of Kenora, Ontario. “We’ve learned to accept this kind of abuse from the system.... I could stand up to the big lumber trucks and the other trucks, but.... I have more fight now because of my children, because of my baby.”15
Not unlike other communities under consideration for nuclear dumps, Grassy Narrows has pretty much seen the bad side of development. In 1960, Dryden Pulp and Paper started contaminating the nearby Wabigoon River in Canada with suspended solids. In March 1962, Reed Paper opened a plant that released an estimated 20 pounds of mercury into the river every day.
In 1963, the government relocated the entire village so as to push more water through the dams to provide power for other communities. “They did it under legislation,” says Grassy Narrows Chief and spokesperson Steve Frobisher. “It took sort of an army to move us.”16 The Grassy Narrows band didn’t get power from the three dams up the river and two dams down the river. Yet their land and their cemetery were flooded, and their ancestors’ corpses floated in the reservoir. Grassy Narrows was no longer a narrows, it was a vast lake.
Meanwhile, mercury contamination was killing the fish. “We knew there was something wrong that the fish were floating within the whole river system. The marine life was dying, and the fish tasted funny. It tasted like oil or something that had rusted,” says Frobisher. It took a university student from Boston, Massachusetts, to uncover the scope of the mercury releases. On September 28, 1975, the Ontario Minister of Health publicly admitted that 20 to 30 of the Native people living on the Grassy Narrows reserve showed symptoms of mercury poisoning.
As a result, commercial fishing by area Anishinaabeg was closed down, and unemployment on the reserve rose to over 80 percent. Their attempt to procure rights to uncontaminated fish from a nearby lake was defeated by non-Native lodge owners who wanted to use the lake for sports fishing. Between 1969 and 1974, welfare tripled on the White Dog Reserve and quadrupled at Grassy Narrows. Mercury discharge continued virtually unabated until 1970 when, after more than 50,000 pounds of mercury had been dumped into the Wabigoon River system, the plant stopped the discharge.
The poison devastated the Anishinaabeg community. “The consequence was that there was a disruption of our ways of living, the ways that our people used to live before: [our] spirituality, culture, self-esteem, and all of that. Because the work didn’t mean anything anymore. That mercury killed everything,” says Frobisher.
We lost everything.... It took 30 years for them to even acknowledge what they had done to us. They compensate [other] people for natural disasters, but they don’t compensate us for what they did to us. Ours wasn’t an act of the Creator, it was the act of man.
The infrastructure on the reserve is minimal. Running water and a sewer system were installed in 1994. There is a nursing station, but no nurses. There is a recently built high school and a volunteer fire department with a fire truck, which Frobisher calls the “noise truck.” The hard rock road into the reserve turns to gravel seven miles before the reserve entrance.
Today, this transformed community is suffering. About 95 percent are on welfare. In the 1970s, it was about 50 percent. The incidence of alcoholism is about 50 percent, but “you wouldn’t find anybody sober in the 1970s,” says Frobisher. “We are still tested today for mercury. That is a program that’s going to be here forever,” he says.
The Canadian government is spending $10 billion to study the nuclear waste dump site on Grassy Narrows. “White people don’t usually spend billions to do a study unless they’re doing something with it,” says De Silva. “There are so many environmental things that have happened here that we never yelled about, because we just settled for compensation. Because we’re poor, we just settled for money. That’s probably what the government is counting on.”
The work of Native anti-nuclear advocates during those years—when a good deal of money and influence was intended to persuade tribes to accept the waste—was especially critical. Grace Thorpe is one such activist.
Grace is a bear of a woman. She was a U.S. corporal stationed in New Guinea at the end of World War II when the first atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. She is also a veteran of most domestic Indian wars in the past decades, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island and the struggle to reinstate the decathlon and pentathlon medals of her father, Jim Thorpe, which were won and confiscated in the 1912 Olympics. This veteran emerged victorious from a battle in her own territory, the Sac and Fox nation of Oklahoma. In 1992, she, along with other community members, convinced her tribal government to withdraw their application for study of a nuclear waste repository in their homeland.
Grace found out that her tribe had signed up for an MRS grant in a newspaper article. “Nobody in the tribe knew anything about it,” she says. “I was shocked.... The treasurer of the tribe told me that they got more phone calls that day than in the history of the tribe.”
I knew diddly-squat about radioactivity. I went to the library right away and got some books out. When I read that you can’t see it, can’t smell it, and can’t hear it, but it was the most lethal poison in the history of man, I knew that...our sacred land shouldn’t even be associated with it.
I’m on the health council and am a part-time district court judge in our tribal court. So I started talking with everyone about it. Finally, we brought it to a vote of the people, and there were 75 votes in attendance of this special meeting. Seventy voted against it; five were for it. The five who were for it were the tribal council. We voted them out. The money was there, [but] they had to return the check.
All of a sudden, I was a kind of hero. Now I’ve been getting calls from all over asking me to talk [to] their community about what we did.17
In 1993, she founded NECONA, the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans. Through her stature as an elder and statesperson in Indian country (“Having a dad like mine didn’t hurt much,” she says), Grace was able to participate in most national Native meetings and talk about the hazards surrounding nuclear waste.
I caught up with Grace one day on her way back from the Ft. McDermitt Paiute Reservation in Nevada. She’d just been attending a community meeting on the second phase MRS research grant the tribe was considering. Local Paiutes had asked Native people who had faced the nuclear industry to come in and tell both sides of the story. Grace and a half-dozen other grassroots activists had found their way to the Nevada reservation to address the Paiutes’ concerns. After the forum, it looked like the Paiutes would have a referendum.
Ultimately, community work such as Grace’s and NECONA’s on most of the MRS’s proposed reservation sites doomed the program. In 1996, Congress withheld funding for the program.18
NECONA urged tribes to institute nuclear-free zones on their lands, and, by 1997, 75 tribal governments in both the United States and Canada had agreed.19 By 1998, there were only two tribes who had not removed themselves from the MRS program: the Ft. McDermitt Paiutes and the Skull Valley Goshutes.
A Private Initiative in the Goshutes
In 1996, a group of utilities—New York’s Con Edison, Georgia’s Southern Nuclear, Pennsylvania’s GPU, Illinois Power, Indiana’s Michigan Power, and Wisconsin’s Genoa Fuel Tech—under the leadership of Northern States Power chartered a new corporation called Private Fuel Storage (PFS), incorporating it in the state of Delaware.
The PFS facility would function pretty much like a nuclear waste condominium owned by a consortium of utilities. And PFS, as a limited liability corporation, conveniently shielded the individual companies from any liability arising out of the subsidiary’s actions. If there was an accident at PFS, in moving nuclear waste, for instance, only the parent company (PFS) and not the individual utilities could be sued.
In 1997, PFS signed a lease with the Skull Valley Goshute Tribal Council for 40 acres of the 180,000-acre reservation. That land would become an above-ground storage facility, a kind of nuclear parking lot on the reservation.
Jean Belile is working with Ohngo Guadableh Devia, a Goshute community group opposed to the dump. She is skeptical about the PFS deal. “I think it’s the government that’s pushing the whole thing; they tried to do an MRS there, and this is one way to get around the [opposition to the] whole thing.”
Margene Bullcreek is the main organizer for Ohngo Guadableh Devia. “Our forefathers passed on our history,” she says. “It tells us how we are to live in the world if we are to continue as a people. It is still being told in our homes—of our feathered friends, the birds of all colors, who at one time fought for our land and our people. It is our responsibility to continue to fight for the protection and preservation of our homeland.... The waste will damage our plant life, water, air, and spiritual atmosphere as well as future generations.”20
Margene is a tiny Goshute woman in her mid-50s who is taking on some big companies. As we sit together outside in a tent, I ask her what her village looks like. She draws me a little map that looks like a skimpy telegraph pole. About six or seven families live there. “We really don’t have anything here, we have a community building we got ten years ago and a paved road that goes to the proving grounds,” she says.
Characterized by one reporter as the kind of place where Mad Max might find a home, the Dugway Proving Ground is where, until 1969, the U.S. military conducted open-air testing of chemical and biological weapons. In August 1996, Dugway began burning up its stockpile. Nearby, in Tooele, Utah, are two commercial hazardous-waste incinerators. On the reservation itself, a private company test-bums rocket-motors under a deal with tribal members. Then, as Cherie Parker reports in the Twin Cities Reader,
There are the sheep carcasses. Nearly 30 years ago, 6,000 sheep reportedly died after being exposed to nerve gas. The details are a bit hazy due to an X Files-type reluctance on the part of the military to admit just what went on at Dugway. Initially the military blamed the mass deaths on pesticide poisoning, but an autopsy reportedly revealed a nerve agent. The Goshute had to broker a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to disinter the sheep bodies. According to Utah state officials, the military has neither confirmed nor denied the nerve gas accident, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently has undertaken what it terms the Tooele County Sheep Project, to clean up the contaminated site.21
Tribal politics are tough at Goshute, as on most other reservations. The numbers are small, so it’s usually a few families or a family who end up with the most influence. When the tribe voted on whether to consider the PFS dump, half the participants walked out of the meeting. Those who remained voted in favor of the dump. “It’s family against family now,” says Jean Belile. The pro-dump advocates are “punishing the people who are against them. For instance, they get a dividend from the tribal treasury every year at Christmastime; some of the people got $200, and some got $1600.”
In 1998, the BIA approved a lease for PFS that provides little protection for the tribe, should the dump pose future risks. Says Belile, “The lease...gives the tribe no out, ever. It’s horrible. I don’t think the bureau has met their obligations [of] trust responsibility for the tribe.”
The community’s lack of infrastructure makes them even more vulnerable. “If anything does happen,” says Jean, “it’s going to take 45 minutes to an hour for someone to respond to anything. They have to rely on Tooele County for help. They have to go through the mountains or clear around the mountains to get there.” PFS did agree to provide the tribe with a new fire truck in case of emergencies.
The tribal chairman promised each tribal member $2 million if the dump gets built.22 That kind of money, in a poor community like the Goshutes, has a lot of sway. Margene, however, and a lot of others, hope that the Goshute traditions and the loyalty to an ancestral homeland will be more persuasive. And that somehow, some of the money might be put into cleaning up the present mess, before any new toxins come into their territory.
The Prairie Island nuclear facility is composed of two nuclear reactors built by Westinghouse for the Minnesota-based utility Northern States Power (NSP) in 1973 and 1974. Located on a sandbar in the middle of the Mississippi River, the reactors have the dubious distinction of being situated in a flood plain and on the Mdewakanton Dakota Prairie Island homeland. The facility sits a few hundred yards from the homes, businesses, and childcare center of that community, a historic site of a traditional village and burial mound dating back at least 2,000 years.
The plant went up just next to the reservation boundary, but was technically in the city of Red Wing, Minnesota. Ironically, although the plant produces an estimated 15 percent of Minnesota’s power, not a watt of it goes to the Mdewakanton community.23 While the city negotiated a deal that included tax benefits and other income from the plant, the neighboring Mdewakantons couldn’t even afford to hire an attorney to help decipher the contracts. The Bureau of Indian Affairs negotiated on behalf of the Mdewakantons, selling right of way along the only road running through the reservation for $178, with neither a discount on the plant’s power nor a portion of the $20 million the plant would pay in property taxes to Red Wing.24
It is likely that the plant has contaminated Prairie Island residents, who have been poorly informed of even those safety breaches that the facility acknowledges. For 30 minutes in 1979, the plant leaked radioactivity into the environment, and most of the staff were rushed off-site. The Dakota people of Prairie Island heard about it on the radio. In 1989, radioactive tritium was found in the community’s wells. The utility blamed the contamination on bomb tests from the 1950s to 1960s. In 1994, the Minnesota Department of Health found that the plant had exposed Prairie Island residents to six times greater risk of cancer.25 Local people say that almost every family has lost someone to cancer.26
The problem is that the facility doesn’t have enough space to store its wastes. According to the Prairie Island Coalition, formed in 1990 to oppose bad nuclear policy in Minnesota, the company “has known with increasing certainty during each of those past 20 years that the day would come when no waste storage space would remain in the plant’s spent fuel pools.”27
Each year, NSP found itself with a massive pile of radioactive waste and no place left to put it. By 1986, the storage problem had become acute. Finally, they piled the fuel into tall, reinforced-steel cans set outside the plant, in effect creating an on-site nuclear dump. In 1988, they had to request permission from the government to store more fuel above ground in what’s called “dry cask storage.” This type of storage is a sort of parking lot full of big cement casks full of waste, which would significantly expand the risk to the tribe.
According to Faye Brown, the tribe took an active role in disputing the request. “The tribe said, ‘This isn’t going to happen. We don’t want it next to our land.’”
This was environmental racism.... [They thought] it was somehow acceptable to do this to Indian people. This would never ever have been tolerated in... the rich suburbs of the Twin Cities. They actually started building the damn thing before they [had state authorization].
And so began a six-year battle, one of the biggest fights in the Minnesota legislature ever. The fight was watched with great trepidation and interest by utilities and anti-nuclear activists across the country, because the battle over nuclear waste storage was raging in every state that had a nuclear reactor.
Although the tribe was able for the first time to hire a lobbyist and a few attorneys, Northern States Power was sure to spend more. During the six-month period that included the 1994 session, NSP volleyed about $1.3 million into the legislature “to influence legislative action.” As journalist Monika Bauerlein notes,
Almost $1.1 million went into an advertising campaign that blanketed newspapers with full-page testimonials attesting to the dump’s safety. The company also listed two dozen lobbyists on its payroll, and [they had] hired guns with political connections on both sides of the aisle.28
In 1994, the Minnesota legislature authorized an interim dump and the placement of 17 casks of nuclear waste on a concrete pad on that sand bar in the Mississippi River, three blocks from the tribe’s childcare center. The Prairie Island band fought to the end, even refusing an offer of $220 million from NSP.
There were some small victories for the Mdewakanton. The legislature mandated that the facility would be closed down unless there was a permanent storage facility operating by 2004. That, according to Brown, “is precedent-setting. That’s the first time a state legislature mandated the shut down of a nuclear reactor if they didn’t have a nuclear waste dump.”
Before 2004, the utility would have to find a better solution for its waste storage problem.
The debate over nuclear power’s final resting place is becoming increasingly volatile. Despite the back-room dealings of Northern States Power and the other big utilities, an increasingly concerned public is slowly becoming aware of a bill pending in Congress known derisively as “Mobile Chernobyl.” That bill has perhaps one of the largest potential ecological impacts of any piece of legislation ever presented to the U.S. Congress. It would authorize the transportation of up to 90,000 shipments of nuclear waste on America’s highways and railways across the country. That, according to many Americans, whether doctors, firefighters, or residents of the small towns along the major interstates, is a public health hazard of monstrous proportions.
Pushed through with some heavy lobbying by the nuclear industry and a sentiment in Congress of “get it out of my backyard,” the bill authorizes the transport of nuclear waste from 108 nuclear reactors to Yucca Mountain in Western Shoshone territory. As Senator Rod Grams of Minnesota, a co-author of the 1997 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, explains it, “We in the Senate have done our part in trying to restore the promises made by the federal government to the ratepayers of this country to move nuclear waste out of our home states.”29
To start with, Northern States Power put about $171,000 into its congressional delegations’ coffers, and the other members of the Nuclear Energy Institute also anted up, sending about $12.8 million to their congressional delegations to set up the interim site at Yucca Mountain. That money is almost three times the amount utilities have spent on Congress in nearly a decade.
The problem is that Yucca Mountain doesn’t really get the waste out of the senators’ backyards. Yucca Mountain would create yet another nuclear waste site. Operating reactors would still have to store waste on their sites, because the radiation is so hot that it has to chill in liquid for five to ten years before it can be transported. Perhaps most alarming, the waste would be moving on U.S. highways. More than 50 million Americans live within a half-mile of the most likely route, near some of the nation’s largest cities: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Denver, Portland, and others.
Nuclear Information and Resource Service director Michael Marriote outlined some of the problems in his congressional testimony on the act. First, there will be some potentially disastrous accidents. According to the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, there have been about 2,400 shipments of high-level nuclear waste in the United States (most of it in small quantities from submarine reactors). There have been seven accidents associated with those shipments, none of which involved the release of radioactive materials. This rate of one accident per 343 shipments translates into, at the very minimum, 268 accidents resulting from the 15,000 to 90,000 shipments of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.
Second, the act’s designation of acceptable radiation exposure is dangerously high. The act establishes a radiation standard for Yucca Mountain of 100 millirems per year, or what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculates is the equivalent of a 1 in 286 lifetime risk of fatal cancer. Yet, Marriote observed, “our nation typically regulates pollutants to ensure that exposure to them will cause no more than a 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 1,000,000 lifetime risk of fatal cancer.”30
It was that Indian
Martinez
from over by Bluewater
Was the one who discovered uranium west of Grants.
That’s what they said.
He brought in that green stone
into town one afternoon in 1953.
Said he found it by the railroad tracks
over by Haystack Butte.
Tourist magazines did a couple spreads
on him, photographed him in Kodak color,
and the Chamber of Commerce celebrated
that Navajo man,
forgot for the time being
that the brothers from
Aacque east of Grants
had killed that state patrolman,
and never mind also that the city had a jail full of Indians.
The city fathers named a city park after him
and some even wanted to put up a statue of Martinez but others said
that was going too far for just an Indian
even if he was the one who started that area
into a boom.
—Simon Ortiz, Acoma Pueblo31
“The nuclear industry is hoping for one last twilight dance,” says Harvey Wasserman. “It’s dying in the United States, in western Europe, and Japan.” The big producers are “banking on the hopes of sales to India, China, Iran, and maybe Turkey,” he says.
The problem of nuclear waste, according to Wasserman and others, is “unsolvable.” The only solution, he says, is to “let the stuff sit where it is, then 50 years from now, hopefully [we’ll] have better technology to deal with it. George Crocker, executive director of the North American Water Office and a key force in the Prairie Island Coalition, echoes Wasserman. “We’re basically trying to figure out the best way to bequeath [nuclear waste] to the next generation.... The more we produce, the more overwhelmed [the next generation] will be,” he says grimly.32
For now, the waste debates in this country always seem to end up with the Indians. That is the reality that Virginia Sanchez continues to struggle with. “We have been violated, but we don’t have to get stuck in that rut of victimization,” Virginia says. “We’ve got our grandmothers, our spiritual people, tribal government representatives, all of them...work[ing] together and hav[ing] ceremony together.... We do have a lot of power. Knowing that we’re making progress—it may be in little bits and pieces, but we are definitely making progress. That’s how you begin the healing.”
This struggle to resist and to heal should not be placed solely on the shoulders of women like Virginia Sanchez, Margene Bullcreek, or Judy De Silva. The question of where to dump the nuclear waste generated over the past 20 years is a question that anti-nuclear activists like Faye Brown, George Crocker, Harvey Wasserman, and others believe should be opened up to a full public debate.
“It’s a way to engage this country in a larger political debate on how we’re going to meet this country’s energy needs,” says Brown. “Are we going to rely on this type of energy that kills people and poisons things, or are we going to engage in a discussion about alternatives?”