Shimkus spews "alternative facts" in his push to "Screw Nevada (again)" on the U.S. House floor

U.S. Rep. Shimkus leads a tour of members of congress and their staff into the Yucca Mountain Exploratory Studies Facility tunnel, on April 26 (Chernobyl Day!), 2011. Each time Shimkus take such a tour, intended to boost prospect for reviving the cancelled project, it costs some $15,000 of federal taxpayer money. But than again, if it does open, the price tag would soar, to $100 billion or more.John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican U.S. Representative who authored H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, is using bogus figures in his attempt to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote. See his recent write up, here.

Shimkus writes "$30 billion...has been quietly paid out in court-ordered claims...from a separate, off-budget account known as the judgement fund," to pay for damage awards to nuclear utilities due to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) breach of contract lawsuits. Most unwisely, DOE signed contracts with nuclear utilities in the mid-1980s, commiting to begin accepting title and liability for commercial irradiated nuclear fuel beginning in January 1998, and to haul it to a geologic repository for permanent disposal.

Actually, Shimkus's figure is a gross exaggeration. DOE itself has estimated that by 2020, the amount of such damage awards, at taxpayer expense (the Judgment Fund is housed at the U.S. Treasury; it is taxpayer-funded; it is the fund the federal government uses to pay damages when ordered to by the U.S. courts), would be around $12.3 billion. See point #12, on Page 6, of this 2010 backgrounder prepared by Beyond Nuclear, for documentation of this figure.

Each and every year, another $500 million or so, of taxpayer funding from the Judgment Fund, is awarded by the courts in damages, and forked over by DOE (well, DOJ and the U.S. Treasury, to be precise), for breach of contract.

Yet Shimkus claims that already over $30 billion has been doled out from the Judgment Fund, and by 2020 that figure will surmount $40 billion.

Shimkus's figures are off by some $27.7 billion, as compared to DOE's own estimate! He's more than 300% off!

This is not the first time Shimkus has played fast and loose with the truth.

Last year, shockingly, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (Democrat-CA) informed his own constituents in San Luis Obispo, CA -- members of the anti-nuclear group Mothers for Peace (MFP) -- that he supported H.R. 3053. When MFP expressed deep concerns about the Yucca Mountain dump, Carbajal said the bill had nothing to do with Yucca Mountain. That is what he had been told by Shimkus. And Carbajal believed it, hook, line, and sinker.

Actually, the bill is entirely about the proposed Yucca dump. Carbajal has yet to withdraw his support for the bill, however.

On Oct. 1, 2015, Beyond Nuclear testified before Shimkus's subcommittee, at a hearing about the risks of transporting highly radioactive waste, at the invitation of the Democratic minority. Beyond Nuclear and Shimkus butted heads about facts and "alternative facts" (over a year before Trump's election and inauguration, after which Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway concocted the infamously telling phrase "alternative facts"), regarding highly radioactive waste shipping routes through the Chicago area, bound for NV (or so-called "interim storage" in NM and/or TX, for that matter), and how vulnerable those shipments would be to terrorist attack, as by an anti-tank weapon.

Please take action to stop Shimkus's "Screw Nevada (again)"* bill, which would launch Mobile Chernobyls, Floating Fukushimas, Dirty Bombs on Wheels, and Mobile X-ray Machines That Can't Be Turned Off, by the many thousands or tens of thousands through most states over the course of 50 years.

Please act ASAP to help stop this bill!  Both groups and individuals can take action. An environmental coalition of 120+ organizations has sent a letter to the U.S. House, urging opposition to H.R. 3053. The letter will be sent one more time, when the bill moves to the floor for a vote. There is still time to sign your group on if you haven't already. To sign your organization on, please fill out and and submit this Google form, or else directly email Sean Alcorn at NRDC your name, title, organization name, city and state.  Individuals, please contact your own U.S. Rep., and urge them to oppose H.R. 3053. Sierra Club has a webform you can fill out and submit to your U.S. Rep. SEED Coalition of Texas has launched a CREDO petition you can sign. You can also phone your U.S. Rep.'s D.C. office, via the Capitol Switchboard, at (202) 225-3121, by following the instructions. Or you can look up your U.S. Rep.'s direct contact info. here, by entering your zip code, clicking the FIND YOUR REP BY ZIP button, and following the links. To learn more about why H.R. 3053 is a dangerously bad idea, see Beyond Nuclear's Yucca Mountain burial dump, de facto permanent parking lot dump, and radioactive waste transport risk website sections. If you have taken action already, thank you very much. Please consider spreading the word as widely as possible, given the grave risks and high stakes!

Note that Shimkus also plays fast and loose with taxpayer money himself. See the photo and biline above.

Shimkus also has odd timing, or else is entirely tone deaf. In addition to his Chernobyl Day tour of Yucca in 2011, depicted above, he also held his kick off hearing on H.R. 3053 on Chernobyl Day, 2017!

*"The Screw Nevada Bill" is the most commonly used name for the amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act enacted in 1987, that singled out Yucca Mountain as the sole target in the country for a high-level radioactve waste dump. Even Bob Halstead, director of the State Agency for Nuclear Projects, has dubbed H.R. 3053 the "Screw Nevada 2" bill.