Wash., D.C. — On September 20, President Clinton violated the very spirit and letter of his own 1994 Executive order on Environmental Justice by signing the Texas/Maine/Vermont Radioactive Waste dump Compact (HR 629) into law. His signature traded the civil rights of the low-income, Mexican American people of Sierra Blanca, Texas for the nuclear power industry.
“The radioactive waste gun was pointed, loaded and the trigger cocked. Clinton’s signature effectively pulls the federal trigger, Okaying sending radioactive to West Texas, and making it orders of magnitude harder for the local residents to fight it,” stated Diane D’Arrigo of Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “But fight it they will, with growing local, national and international support and concern.”
The town, located on the Texas Mexico border would receive the decommissioned nuclear power reactors and deadly radioactive wastes from Maine and Vermont and else!QW! perhaps as early as 1999. Nearly 40 % of the people in this West Texas region live below the poverty line; 70 % are Hispanic.
The President signed the nuclear power bill despite:
1. clear evidence that the low-income, Mexican American community does not have the political or economic power to refuse the dangerous atomic waste,
2. that the community is already receiving hazardous, industrial NYC sewage sludge,
3. the fact that his signature violates his own Environmental Justice order prohibiting federal agencies from supporting projects that result in discrimination. The US Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been involved in this discriminatory project.
President Clinton’s signature, in addition to granting broad powers favoring the nuclear power industry, releases $55 million to dig the atomic dump in Texas’s most active earthquake zone. The trenches would be directly above a geological fault line.
President Clinton’s action flies in the face of opposition from nearly 200 national, international and local organizations including religious, civil rights, Hispanic, environmental and economic justice groups on record denouncing the dump and Compact. It flaunts the unanimous opposition of the Mexican federal Congress and five Mexican states.
The radioactive waste, which President Clinton and Congress are now pushing on Sierra Blanca, is by no means “low risk.” Mainly resulting from nuclear power, it includes plutonium (hazardous for 1/2 million years), radioiodines (some hazardous for 320 million years), strontium-90 (a bone-seeker which causes bone cancer and leukemia, hazardous for 560 years) and other intensely radioactive elements.
“Clinton is now an accomplice to the racist government of Texas,” charged Richard Boren, coordinator of Southwest Toxic Watch. “Now the US government has given the green light to send nuclear waste from primarily white states like Maine and Vermont to the Texas Border region that is over 70% Mexican American.”
The Compact also opens the door to Texas becoming the nation’s next national nuclear power dump. President Clinton’s signature ratifies a law which omits amendments originally passed in the House and Senate which would have protected Texas from becoming a national dump-state and giving the local community a right to challenge discrimination.
Bill Addington, businessman and rancher from Sierra Blanca, responded to news of the president’s signing, “President Clinton’s 1984 Executive order on Environmental Justice isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” He stated that “This environmental injustice in Sierra Blanca threatens environmental justice throughout the US.”