Even though
"Nevada Is Not a Radioactive Wasteland!" (see photo, left, showing Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps, and
Native Community Action Council's Ian Zabarte, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2018 at the "Zero Hour" youth climate rally),
U.S. House bill H.R. 2699, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, was nonetheless recently rammed through the
Environment and Climate Subcommittee on a voice vote, without so much as a peep of opposition. (See Oct. 1st Western Shoshone letter to U.S. House, opposing H.R. 2699,
here.) Democrats hold the majority in the U.S. House, and thus are in charge of this subcommittee. Subcommittee Democrats include several members of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus. But
H.R. 2699 would rush the opening of the Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada, targeting Western Shoshone Indian land, where decades of nuclear weapons testing already caused fallout of hazardous radioactivity over a very large region. It would even significantly increase the amount of high-level radioactive waste that could be buried there, thus increasing the number of Mobile Chernobyl and Floating Fukushima shipments, by truck, train, and/or
barge, through most states, scores of major urban centers, and the vast majority of U.S. congressional districts, bound for the dump (
see 2017 documents here for road and rail route maps).
The Timbisha Band of Western Shoshone in Death Valley are directly downstream of Yucca, and would suffer the very worst contamination consequences from the leaking dump.
H.R. 2699 would also authorize the U.S. Department of Energy to take ownership of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel at private, consolidated interim storage facilities (CISF). This radical change to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended, would risk "interim" becoming de facto permanent surface storage, meaning loss of institutional control over time would guarantee large-scale releases of hazardous radioactivity directly into the environment.
MORE.
October 16, 2019