A three judge panel at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) secret shipment and storage of large amounts of ultra hazardous, weapons-grade plutonium, can stand, despite the targeted state’s strenuous objections. DOE had actually perpetrated a fraud upon the court, pretending throughout the legal proceeding, for many months on end, that it had not yet shipped the plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site, proving grounds for nuclear weapons test detonations, located on Western Shoshone Indian Nation land against their will, and in violation of treaty rights). However, Nevada’s Attorney General has made clear, there is plenty of fight left in him, to protect Nevadans’ health, safety, and environment.
This horrible ruling comes amidst concerted efforts to revive the Yucca Mountain dump scheme in Nevada, targeting Nevada with 70,000 metric tons (or much more) of high-level radioactive waste and irradiated nuclear fuel from both DOE and the commercial atomic reactors. In this sense, this court ruling is an echo of the 1987 “Screw Nevada bill,” singling out a scientifically unsuitable, non-consent based site for highly radioactive waste permanent geologic disposal. However, united bipartisan Nevada elected officials (governors, attorneys general, state legislators, the U.S. congressional delegation), Western Shoshone, and more than a thousand environmental and environmental justice groups across the country, have held off the Yucca dump for 32 years, and counting. Please join the resistance.
Contact your U.S. Representative, and both your U.S. Senators. Urge them to vote against any authorization or appropriations (funding) bills that would advance the Yucca dump. You can be patched through to your U.S. Congress Members’ D.C. offices via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard, at (202) 224-3121. And since it’s still August recess, you can get together with friends, family, colleagues, etc., to request a face to face meeting with one or more of your Members of Congress, on this issue, while they are back home. Learn more about this story at
this link. Keep updated about the Yucca Mountain issue by visiting
our website section devoted to it. (Right at press time, we have learned from Karen Hadden at SEED Coalition in Texas, that the second weapons-grade plutonium shipment from South Carolina may well have gone to Texas, and is now in storage at the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly/disassembly facility.
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