3rd Annual International Rally to Protect the Great Lakes, Port Huron, MI, Sun., Aug. 20, 11am-5pm

Dear All,

I hope you can come, but if you cannot, please spread word to others who may be able to. And please be informed, and inspired, that the resistance to OPG's DGR continues in Michigan, after more than a decade and a half!

Jeremy Whitmore from the board of Great Lakes Environmental Alliance (GLEA) has invited me to come and speak about the ongoing resistance to Ontario Power Generation's proposed "Deep Geologic Repository" (DGR, or DUD-Deep Underground Dump) for radioactive waste, targeted at the Lake Huron shore, at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada. Jeremy has also asked me to address additional radioactive waste storage and transportation risks impacting the Great Lakes, and to set up our Beyond Nuclear info. table. See the text of the GLEA flier below, as well as links to the flier itself in both PDF and JPG formats. The event will take place on the banks of the St. Clair River during the annual Port Huron Float Down event, just like the first annual Rally to Protect the Great Lakes in 2015. Please come if you can, spread the word if you can't, and help us nip the DUD in the bud in the months ahead!

And here is the link to the Facebook event page for the 3rd Annual International Rally to the Protect the Great Lakes in Port Huron, MI next Sunday.

---Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear

P.S. For more info. about the DUD, and other important issues, please see the following links for starters: Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump; S.O.S. (Save Our Shores) Great Lakes; Beyond Nuclear Canada website section; GLEA website.

[Text from flier sent by Jeremy Whitmore]

3rd Annual International Rally to Protect the Great Lakes

Pinegrove Park's Bandshell

Port Huron, MI

[Sunday] August 20, 2017

11am-5pm

Environmental problems & solutions that we face in the Great Lakes

[Speakers:] Kevin Kamps, Joshua Radhs, Venessa Davis, Danielle Williams, Brad Kallio

& musical guest Victor McManemy

[Sponsored by:] Great Lakes Environmental Alliance, Beyond Nuclear

[Links to Great Lakes Environmental Alliance's really cool event flier: in PDF format; in JPG format]

Charting Canada’s troubled waters: Where the danger lies for watersheds across the country: Ivan Semeniuk

As posted at SOS Great Lakes:

A national assessment of Canada's freshwater ecosystems has found that each of our 25 watersheds is facing environmental threats.

Out of 167 sub-watersheds 31% exhibit high levels of stress and 66% are data deficient.

The absence of a standardized national water monitoring program has left Canada unprepared to address increasing pressures on freshwater ecosystems.

“Water – despite its theoretical abundance – is probably the biggest looming problem in Canada,” said David Schindler, one of Canada’s most highly regarded freshwater scientists.

The article reports:

The assessment finds that the data are too deficient in 110 out of the 167 subwatersheds to form a baseline picture of ecosystem health, including in some relatively populated areas where freshwater is essential to communities, such as in southern Manitoba, Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley or the Bruce region of Ontario. (emphasis added)

The Bruce region of Ontario hosts the world's largest nuclear power plant, by number of reactors: Bruce Nuclear Generating Station (BNGS), with eight operable reactors, and a ninth permanently shutdown prototype. The eight Bruce reactors lack cooling towers, discharging their massive amounts of waste heat directly into Lake Huron. Their CANDU reactor design is also an infamous generator and emitter of radioactive hydrogen (tritium), both to air and water, impacting the adjacent Lake Huron.

BNGS's "Western Waste Management Facility" has served for four decades as a concentration location for all of Ontario's "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes, including from another dozen reactors east of Toronto at Pickering and Darlington nuclear power plants. Much to all of the combustible "low" level radioactive wastes have even been incinerated at Bruce, with untold atmospheric emissions of tritium and other volatile radioactive hazards, including fallout on Lake Huron.

Since 2001, Ontario Power Generation, owner of the province's 20 atomic reactors, has also targeted BNGS for a shoreline "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive waste dump.

Three Ontario municipalities near BNGS are still in the running for Canada's high-level radioactive waste dump as well, with fear that the "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive waste dump could expand to include high-level radioactive waste as well.

Lake Huron is central to the Great Lakes -- 21% of the world's surface fresh water, and 84% of North America's -- both geographically, and figurately. The Great Lakes are the drinking water supply for 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a large number of Native American First Nations.

See the full Globe and Mail article.

Great Lakes delegates to Tillerson: Oppose Canadian N-waste burial plan

As posted at SOS Great Lakes:

32 members of Congress from the Great Lakes region have sent a letter to the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, asking that he block plans for permanent storage of radioactive waste near Lake Huron.

The letter states: "Any contamination whatsoever would pose disastrous repercussions as all of the lakes are connected to one another, and no barrier, man-made or natural, would be able to stop a potential catastrophe of epic proportions."

See the Buffalo News article.

Michigan [U.S. congressional] legislative battle against Canadian Nuclear Waste Repository expands with letter to Secretary of State

As reported by Michigan Peninsula News.

Lawmakers ask State to fight nuclear disposal plan

As reported by the Detroit News.