Voices from the Earth: Current Issue

SRIC Friends

Table of
Contents
2001: A Nuclear Waste Odyssey
From The President
Uranium Bailout Bill
ENDAUM Gains Ground
Dumping on Tribal Land
Nevada Opposes a Repository at Yucca Mountain
WIPP: Expanding or Not?
Black Ranch Appeal Update
Shedding Light on Uranium Operations in Siberia
Book Reviews
Mine Reclamation in New Mexico
Glossary

"Federal policy…has been to assure that "waste management problems shall not be deferred to other generations," and many environmental groups have shared the same view. Geological burial - at first glance anyway - looks like an ideal way to accomplish that since, after all, it "removes" the wastes from the environment and solves the problem once and for all. But in many ways entombment does just the opposite. It deliberately poisons a portion of the natural world for an endless stretch of time and in doing so it not only leaves future generations with thousands of tons of the most dangerous rubbish imaginable on their hands but makes it as difficult as the state of our technology permits for them to deal with it. We cannot promise our children - never mind those who will follow hundreds or thousands of years hence - that they will be safe from the wastes. And so long as that is so, we are not taking the problem out of their hands so much as we are taking the solution out of their hands."

— Kai Erikson
"Out of Sight, Out of Our Minds"
The New York Times Magazine
March 6, 1994.

Yucca Mountain, in the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation, is a place of deep spiritual significance to Shoshone and Pauite peoples. Despite this, the federal government plans to send there 98 percent of the radioactivity generated during the entire Nuclear Age. The government has no right to use Yucca Mountain this way. Newe Sogobia—the land guaranteed the Western Shoshone Nation by treaty—includes Yucca Mountain. Even the mere study of the site is a violation of the treaty. The Shoshone people have made their wishes clear: They want the DOE off their land and their mountain restored to them. Because of U.S. nuclear testing over Nevada, the Western Shoshone Nation is already the most bombed nation on earth. They suffer from widespread cancer, leukemia, and other disease as a result of fallout from more than 900 atomic explosions on their territory.

SIDEBAR ARTICLES High Level Waste Transportation Problems with the Yucca Mountain Site Yucca Mountain: No Place for Nuclear Waste (Western Shoshone perspective) CONTACTS Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office 1802 N Carson St, # 252 Carson City, NV 89701 (775) 687-3744 www.state.nv.us/nucwaste DOE Yucca Mountain Project Office PO Box 30307 North Las Vegas, NV 89136-3037 (800) 225-6972 www.ymp.gov Citizen Alert PO Box 17173 Reno, NV 891114 (775) 827-4200 www.igc.org/citizenalert Shundahai Network PO Box 6360 Pahrump, NV 89041 (775) 537-6088 www.shundahai.org Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program 215 Pennsylvania Ave., SE Washington, DC 20003 (202) 454-5130 www.citizen.org/cmep