Grassroots Campaign Launched to Oppose Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Dump and Nuclear Industry Expansion

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus



There are 103 nuclear power plants currently operating in the U.S., and several more that have been decommissioned. But whether they're on-line or off-line, all these plants are storing high-level radioactive waste on-site, 77,000 tons in all. The waste is sitting mostly in spent fuel pools, with no containment structures to prevent leakage into the environment or protection from terrorist attack.

The federal government has for many years proposed that the nation's radioactive waste be sent to an underground storage facility at Yucca Mountain, located on Native American land in Nevada just a few hours from Las Vegas, one of America's fastest-growing cities. President George W. Bush recently authorized Yucca Mountain as the only designated high-level nuclear waste site in the U.S. But Nevada's elected officials and citizens solidly oppose the plan and hope to overturn it in Congress. Grassroots anti-nuke activists recently convened a national conference at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, April 12-14, to hammer out a unified position from which to oppose the Yucca Mountain repository, the continued operation of existing nuclear power plants and a White House proposal to build new plants.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Deborah Katz, executive director of the Citizens Awareness Network, which organized the Wesleyan conference. Katz helped shut down the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant in her hometown in Massachusetts. She describes the impact of Yankee Rowe and another nearby plant on the health of people in her community, other options for waste storage, and what activists are doing to fight the Yucca Mountain project(A RealAudio Version of this interview may be found at http://www.btlonline.org).

For more information, call the Citizens Awareness Network at (413) 339-5781 or visit their Web site at www.nukebusters.org

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