“Senator Reid has thrown himself in front of thousands of trains of nuclear waste that could be headed for Nevada,” said Mary Olson, a nuclear waste policy analyst with Nuclear Information & Resource Service, referring to a comment made by Reid which appeared in Trade Press this week. “We are fighting the Mobile Chernobyl Bills to win, and in fact, we have won every year since these irresponsible legislative proposals were first tendered in 1994! That is five years of holding back the nuclear industry on Capital Hill. We are not going to stop now!”
NIRS has led national environmental organizations including Sierra Club, Public Citizen, US PIRG, Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resource Defense Council and a huge grassroots movement in 50 states in coalition with the Nevada congressional delegation and the Clinton Administration to stop these proposals, collectively known as “Mobile Chernobyl” since they trigger the largest nuclear waste shipping campaign in history.”
“Murkowski’s SB 1287 is being touted as a ‘compromise bill,’ but it is the same old Mobile Chernobyl legislation that would run high-level nuclear waste down roads and rails for 30 years through hundreds of towns and cities across this country,” said Olson. “This is still “Screw Nevada” legislation which lowers the standards for a repository at Yucca Mountain so low that it virtually insures that the nation’s nuclear waste would go in a hole that even the Department of Energy says is going to leak. This is not responsible nuclear waste policy! We would definitely stand in front of trucks to stop this!”
“Murkowski’s “compromise” is nothing more than a façade, it is not what would be the finished product from this congress. Anyone who thinks so has forgotten that the House still has the nuclear industry’s Wish List in the text of its bill HR 45 which is still pending. This is classic nuclear waste Guerilla war tactics in the guise of policy making,” said Mary Olson. “The nuclear industry boosters just want to get the Senate on record with a ‘moderate’ bill. Then they go into conference committee with the House version with all its hard-line nuclear industry benefits. The final conference bill is likely to not only reflect HR 45 but even contain new surprises that were not in either bill. This is a trick we have seen many times. We are not going to fall for it this time!” concluded Olson.
National environmental and public interest organizations, their members and concerned citizens nationwide, particularly along the transport routes have successfully fought this legislation together with the Clinton Administration. Clinton has threatened to veto changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (current law) that would weaken environmental protection.
The Murkowski bill would remove the Environmental Protection Agency from its job of setting radiation standards, and would by law say that people in Nevada should have 10 times more risk of fatal cancer from the Yucca Mountain site than those living near some of the worst Superfund sites, and a thousand times greater chance than the one death in a million standard applied to most other practices and sites that cause avoidable deaths among the general public.