PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES:
AIRPLANE BANNER FLYING OVERHEAD (“DON’T COOK NATIVE LANDS WITH WASTE DUMPS!”) OVER THE COOK NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, PLUS PROTESTORS WITH BANNERS AT THE FRONT ENTRANCE TO THE COOK NUCLEAR PLANT.
Bridgman, MI — At 3:00 p.m. on Monday, June 19th, 2000 an airplane banner (“Don’t Cook Native Lands with Waste Dumps!”) will fly over the Cook Nuclear Power Plant along the Lake Michigan Shoreline south of St. Joseph, Michigan to protest Cook’s imminent re-start after a nearly three year government-forced shut down for safety violations. Protestors with banners and a full-size (20 foot long, 8 foot tall, on a trailer) mock nuclear waste cask will perform street theater at Cook’s main entrance, protesting American Electric Power’s (AEP) efforts to dump its high-level nuclear wastes on a Native American reservation out West.
The protest takes place on the very day that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety Licensing Board begins hearings in Salt Lake City on the application of Private Fuel Storage, a limited liability corporation established to build an “interim high-level nuclear waste storage facility” on the reservation land of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians in Utah. AEP is one of eight nuclear utilities across the U.S. that have formed Private Fuel Storage in hopes of sending their high-level atomic wastes to Utah for disposal.
“Cook Nuclear Plant is guilty of environmental racism of the worst kind,” said Kevin Kamps, a lifelong resident of Kalamazoo who now works as nuclear waste specialist at Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Washington, D.C. “High-level nuclear wastes are the deadliest and most long-lasting poisons that have ever been created. Now AEP wants to re-start Cook, generate more deadly wastes, and has bought off the tribal council of a small, destitute Native American tribe out West in order to dump there. They should be ashamed,” Kamps added.
“Our reservation is sacred. This is the only land we have the only thing the government left us after taking most of our country. Imagine what it will be like when we have that waste down there. If it comes to that, I won’t be able to live here. I’ll have to move, and I don’t want to do that,” said Margene Bullcreek, Skull Valley Goshute who leads the fight within her tribe against the waste dump. “What they’re doing is wrong. And down the road, in a time when my grandchildren’s children have health problems and illness and disease, I don’t want them to hear that no one stood up and spoke for them,” Bullcreek added.
“There is nothing moral about buying out somebody who is starving,” said Keith Lewis of the Serpent River First Nation, a Native American tribe on the north shore of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada, just east of Michigan’s U.P. Serpent River was the location of twelve large mines providing the fresh uranium fuel for nuclear power reactors. Although closed now, uranium mine tailings leftover continue to contaminate the soil, air, water, and Lake Huron. High-level wastes are a million times more radioactive than fresh uranium fuel.
“In 1840, thousands of Michigan’s Anishinabek (First People) were rounded up by the U.S. Army and marched 1,000 miles to Kansas at gunpoint in the dead of winter. So many died, the Anishinabek still call it the Trail of Death. Now, 160 years later, this waste would create another trail of death from nuclear reactors like Cook all the way to Native lands out West. An early form of germ warfare used against Native Americans was giving them blankets infested with small pox. Large numbers were wiped out by the disease. Radioactive waste, so often targeted to be dumped on Native Americans, is the small pox blanket of the Atomic Age,” said Kevin Kamps of NIRS.
Plans are well under way for the second annual Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp to take place this August in southwest Michigan. Representatives of the Skull Valley Goshutes, Serpent River First Nation, & Western Shoshone (whose sacred Yucca Mountain in Nevada is targeted for the permanent national high-level nuclear waste dump) are expected to attend, joining hundreds more from around the Great Lakes, including from local First Nations.