FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Residents of the Death Valley area, directly downstream from Yucca Mountain, are gearing up to tell the Department of Energy (DOE) in their own way how they feel about dumping the nation’s high-level nuclear waste on their communities. A colorful press conference will be held at 2:30 pm, Wednesday, October 10th, outside the Longstreet Casino, prior to the DOE hearing on Preliminary Site Suitability. Representatives from the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and Amargosa and Inyo County, CA, communities will speak, next to a life-size inflatable mock nuclear waste cask.
Local residents are sick of being characterized as the "maximum dose receptors" for radiation from DOE’s proposed Yucca Mountain Repository. They say their communities are real people, who should be entitled to the same rights and protections as all other Americans. Yucca Mountain, 90 miles north of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied to receive 77,000 tons of deadly nuclear reactor fuel from 43 states around the nation.
Doris M. Jackson, Chair of the Amargosa Valley Advisory Council, President of the Chamber of Commerce and a local business owner, says that in the 1980’s she was all for the Repository, falling for the hype about growth and jobs. But now, she knows that out of the 3,000 people employed by the Yucca Mountain Project, only five have come from Amargosa Valley. She has visited the WIPP transuranic nuclear waste dump in New Mexico, attended many seminars, and learned from New Mexico’s experience. Broad promises of funding made to New Mexico, which eventually secured approval for the WIPP dump after years of controversy, were defaulted once the trucks began to roll. Lawsuits have already proven that property values plummet. Homeowner and health insurance do not cover damage from radiological accidents.
" I don’t want to leave this mess for my grandchildren," says Doris Jackson, "Not when there are other alternatives. In daily life, you can’t just bury your problems and walk away. The same goes for the nation." She is writing a song for the occasion.
Fellow Councilman Ed Goedhart, an organic dairy farmer whose milk nourishes children for miles around, has fields within 12 miles of Yucca Mountain. Like other local pistachio growers, he worries who will buy food products from next to a nuclear dump. He plans on bringing his cows to the press conference.
Jennifer O. Viereck, a member of the Southeast Area Citizens Advisory Board to the Inyo County Board of Supervisors, is very concerned about the fact that Yucca Mountain rainwater runs off into the Amargosa River. The Amargosa, one of the biggest rivers in the west, runs south through several Inyo communities and beyond. Inyo County residents would be impacted by the repository far more than many Nevadans.
"In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission privately referred to ranchers and Indians downwind from the Nuclear Test Site as a ‘low-use segment of society’", Viereck states. "Fifty years later, nothing has changed. Now we’re ‘dose receptors’. Our children are the canaries trapped in DOE’s cage."
Pauline Esteves, a Timbisha Shoshone Elder, says, "Human errors are always there, as well as human conflict. A terrorist attack on transportation routes in this remote area could quickly make Yucca Mountain a global issue." The Timbisha Shoshone were finally awarded a tribal homeland last year, after a sixty-seven year struggle. One year later, their new home has been designated as a potential rail route for high-level nuclear waste.
DOE’s poorly planned hearing in Las Vegas last week on September 5th drew a crowd of well over 500. Only 65 of the 132 people who signed up were able to testify. Forty dictated to a court reporter in a small side room. Many more did not bother to sign up—by 6:30 pm, the speaking slots were booked as far as 4:30 am. Citizen Alert took an informal exit poll in which drivers of 103 vehicles responded that they had been unable to speak.