A protest against dumping high-level nuclear wastes on Native American lands and communities has been scheduled for 7 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 26th at the Chesebrough Auditorium in the Chrysler Building at the University of Michigan’s North Campus.
The protest is being held outside a talk entitled “The Transportation of Radioactive Material: Mobile Chernobyl!?” to be given by Dr. Ruth Weiner, Senior Environmental Scientist at Jason Associates Corporation. Dr. Weiner formerly worked at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“Obviously, Dr. Weiner’s talk will attempt to sedate members of the public to the dangers of high-level nuclear waste transportation, and will most probably not even address the environmental racism of dumping nuclear wastes on Native American communities and lands,” said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist at Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) in Washington, D.C. NIRS coined the phrase “Mobile Chernobyl,” which referes to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine, to describe high-level nuclear waste transportation.
Kamps learned of the talk while visiting friends attending U of M. He discussed the issues with members of the U of M Native American Student Association, Environmental Justice and Environmental Action student organizations, as well as members of Don’t Waste Michigan, the Statewide anti-nuclear power group.
“The decision was made to protest the talk, to try to get some of the truth out about these issues,” Kamps said.
“Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in New York City, who received a Ph.D. in high energy theoretical physics from the U of M in 1965 and now serves on NIRS board of advisors, has calculated that a single severe transport accident releasing radiation in an urban area could cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up, and could cause over 100 latent cancer fatalities,” Kamps said.
“If the nuclear industry gets its way, tens of thousands of truck and train shipments of high-level nuclear waste will pass through 43 States, past the homes of 50 million Americans, over the course of 25 years. The Department of Energy itself predicts hundreds of accidents, some of which may be severe enough to breach the transport containers. Testing standards for the containers are outdated, inadequate, and do not measure up to real life accident possibilities such as a high speed collision followed by a high temperature, long duration fire,” Kamps said.
“In addition, almost all of the proposed high-level nuclear waste dumps for the past 15 years have been targeted at economically strapped Native American communities. Presently, the nuclear industry is attempting to open an “interim” dump on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah, while the federal government is targeting Western Shoshone Indian land at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for the permanent national dump. This is blatant environmental racism. Targeting Native communities in this shameful way makes atomic waste the smallpox blanket of the nuclear age,” Kamps said.