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July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Seeking Nuclear Justice: Voices from the Marshallese Diaspora in Arkansas

By Benetick Kabua Maddison, and the
Marshallese Educational Initiative team
“… for the good of mankind,” by Marshallese artist Marino Morris. U.S. military authorities who commandeered the Marshall Islands in 1946 and targeted them with over 60 nuclear bomb blasts, declared to the Indigenous Marshallese inhabitants that the destruction of their islands was being done, “for the good of mankind.”

This year marks the expiration of the Compact of Free Association, an agreement between the United States and Marshall Islands governments originally signed in 1986, in part to mitigate the damages from U.S. nuclear weapons testing. The United States conducted 67 high-yield nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958, the biological, ecological, and cultural consequences of which are ongoing.

My homelands, which were characterized as tiny and scattered islands with a small, expendable population when lands were needed for nuclear tests for the “good of mankind” and for “world peace,” now looms large in U.S. national security interests in the Pacific, due to the perceived threat of China. Marshallese leaders want the Biden Administration to fairly address the nuclear legacy. It appears the administration is willing to do so. They should.

The Marshall Islands needs well-funded medical facilities with cancer specialists and educational facilities that can accommodate trained teachers until we can produce our own, along with scholarships for our youth seeking higher education, and improvements to infrastructure and communications. Addressing the needs and well-being of the Marshallese people was promised under the Trust Territory of the Pacific framework, an agreement that the U.S. government forged under the United Nations from 1947 to 1986, but never came to fruition. Under a new compact and with a Biden Administration committed to equity and justice, the United States must do better.

And what of Marshallese who have already left the islands seeking access to healthcare, education, and employment? Those of us in diaspora now make up two-thirds of the Marshallese population. How can both sides say they are committed to nuclear justice and yet not address the needs of the Marshallese in the United States?

The nuclear weapons testing legacy — the driving force behind migration and the need for a compact — has taken its toll on all Marshallese people. The ongoing consequences of the nuclear legacy, including its impact on Marshallese bodies and culture, recognizes no geopolitical boundaries.

In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Marshallese living in the United States were among the hardest hit of all ethnic groups. In Northwest Arkansas, where the highest concentration of Marshallese reside in the continental United States, we make up 3% of the population, but accounted for 40% of the deaths due to Covid-19 in the early summer. Part of our vulnerability was due to underlying health conditions — cancer and diabetes —that are a direct result of U.S. post-war occupation and the weapons testing legacy.

Most public benefits that were a part of the original compact have been removed over the years, chipped away by new legislation, sometimes purposeful, sometimes not. However, Medicaid was finally restored in December 2020. Most Marshallese remain without healthcare and are vulnerable.

What Marshallese qualify for under the full Compact of Free Association is unknown not just to most U.S. citizens, but to federal officials whose responsibility it is to make decisions on Marshallese eligibility. There are still issues with Medicaid enrollment, and there is confusion among U.S. officials regarding the correct documentation needed for entering and working in the United States, while interpretations of what federal financial aid Marshallese students qualify for differ from state to state.

Under the current Compact, the United States continues to designate the nuclear-affected as only those from the atolls in which the tests took place, Bikini and Enewetak, and the two atolls that received the heaviest fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo detonation, Rongelap and Utrōk. However, according to witnesses and the U.S. government’s own documents released in the 1990s, contamination was much more widespread.

Marshallese government officials made this case to the United States in 2000 when it submitted a Changed Circumstances Petition that included evidence from newly released U.S. documents that confirm the contamination. The George W. Bush White House and Congress rejected that petition. Will this administration do better in the cause for nuclear justice?

Many of our families have migrated and continue to migrate in increasing numbers, now more and more due to climate change. For my family and all Marshallese families living in diaspora in Arkansas and across the United States, whose lands, bodies, and culture were sacrificed, we ask to be heard, to be seen, and to be treated fairly.

—Benetick Kabua Maddison, Executive Director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative. Contact: info@mei.ngo. For more on nuclear testing history, visit www.mei.ngo/nuclear.

Filed Under: Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Decades of Radioactive Dumping Tied to Cancers at Coldwater Creek

DOE and Army Corps accused of negligence over St. Louis radioactive waste

By Bob Mayberry

Last year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to test for radioactive contamination inside the Jane Elementary School in northern St. Louis, in spite of considerable community pressure to do so. Outside testing eventually revealed levels of contamination 22 times higher than background levels in the playground, and 12 times higher than average inside the gymnasium. The school was closed and local lawmakers persuaded the Corps to conduct new tests.

But it was not until early this year that the Department of Energy (DOE) finally requested permission to test for contamination along Coldwater Creek, and even then only at one site, the historic Fort Belle Fontaine, the first U.S. military installation west of the Missouri River. Meanwhile, reports of disease and incidences of cancer at several sites along the creek continue to surface, and residents complain that federal agencies do not communicate about the dangers in the area.

Brief History of Radioactivity in Metro St. Louis – Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Jane Elementary School sits adjacent to Coldwater Creek, which runs 19 miles between the St. Louis airport and the Missouri River. In 2014, state health officials reported higher incidences of rare cancers associated with low-dose radioactive exposure in areas adjacent to the creek. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended residents avoid getting into or playing near the creek, and in 2019 the federal Department of Health and Human Services released a report concluding that “Radiological contamination in and around Coldwater Creek … could have increased the risk of some types of cancer in people who played or lived there.”

In early March, the Missouri House of Representatives heard testimony about compensation for St. Louis area residents exposed to radioactive waste. State Representative Tricia Byrnes accused the DOE of negligence for failing to remove “the considerable amount of waste around the region.”

The problems began during World War II when the Mallinckrodt Chemical Company began to secretly process uranium ore north of downtown St. Louis as part of the Manhattan Project. Radioactive byproducts were first stored on the St. Louis airport’s northern edge, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, then later trucked to sites further east along the creek, including a site near where the Jane Elementary School now sits. Mallinckrodt officials dismissed the dangers of radioactive waste in a 1946 statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, claiming the waste materials “were not radioactive and not dangerous.”

Brief History of Radioactivity in Metro St. Louis  – Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Though processing of uranium by Mallinckrodt Co. ended in 1957, radioactive and chemical waste materials continued to be shipped to and from sites in and around St. Louis. Between 1957 and 1966, uranium ore was processed near Weldon Spring, west of Coldwater Creek along the Missouri River. Approximately 1.5 million cubic yards of radioactive and chemical waste were piled 75 feet high along Route 94 South, near another St. Louis public school. In 1973, nearly 8,700 tons of barium sulfate waste from the Coldwater Creek area was mixed with 40,000 tons of topsoil and shipped to a landfill in Weldon Spring. Residents claim not to have been notified about any of these dangerous practices.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar 20, 2023

— Bob Mayberry is a retired English and Theater professor at Calif. State Univ. – Channel Islands.

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Rad Waste Dump Decisions: Consent or Bribery?

Photo Credit: https://beyondnuclear.org/4643-2/
Reprinted with permission from Beyond Nuclear

On June 9, the U.S. Department of Energy named 13 consortia, each to receive $2 million in federal taxpayer funding, to help push the DOE’s so-called “consent-based siting” of a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) for highly radioactive waste. The funding will be directed to “groups of university, nonprofit, and private-sector partners” who will help communities decide that they want to be the recipients of the country’s waste reactor fuel. Having abjectly failed to find any safe, long-term radioactive waste management “solution” — possibly because there is none — while also failing to halt the production of radioactive waste, the DOE has now moved to what it calls “consent-based siting.” Ironically, Holtec is the “lead” of one “project team” funded by the DOE, even though the company is trying to force a private CISF on New Mexico, despite a clear lack of consent from the state. Given the three tribal affiliated groups, and three Indigenous Nations, being funded as consortia members, it appears the DOE will target Native American communities once again, as it did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If past examples are any indicator, the “consenting” communities are likely to be those most deprived of resources, especially Indigenous communities and communities of color, who may feel pressured to accept the DOE largesse along with the deadly hazards of living alongside high-level radioactive waste.

— Beyond Nuclear, June 11, 2023

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

1945 Infant Mortality Tells the Story of Trinity

By Bernice Gutierrez, Mary Martinez White, Paul Pino, and Tina Cordova

We are the downwinders of New Mexico, victims of the world’s first ever nuclear bomb explosion at the Trinity Site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. As an added assault on our health, we were also downwind of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. We ask you to support passage of amendments to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) which will expand coverage to New Mexico and other forgotten downwinders across the American west and Guam. Currently the RECA only provides payments of restitution to a few counties in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah.
We are three Hispano cousins who have lost more than 50 family members to cancer. In relation to the Trinity bombing, we have endured a sickening spike in infant mortality, as well as highly increased exposures to toxic plutonium that rained down on New Mexico after the bomb was detonated. Now we are fighting for downwinder parity, and ask for your help.

— Bernice Gutierrez, Mary Martinez White, and Paul Pino, Steering Committee of The Tularosa Basin Downwinder’s Consortium.

Every July, the Tularosa Basin Downwinder’s Consortium holds a candlelight vigil to remember the victims of Trinity, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation.

The Trinity Site is often described as remote and uninhabited, yet there were families living as close as twelve miles from the bomb site and according to census data there were approximately 500,000 people living within a 150-mile radius of Trinity. In addition, 49,579 New Mexicans fought in World War II. New Mexico had the highest rate of military service and the highest proportion of fatalities among all the states in the U.S. Men were being killed on the battlefields while their families were being killed at home in New Mexico.
The bomb was incredibly inefficient and overpacked with 13 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium, but only three pounds of the plutonium was fissioned. The remaining ten pounds ascended some 40,000 feet in the fireball created by the blast, and then fell from the sky blanketing New Mexico. Plutonium, the most dangerous substance known to humankind, has a half-life of more than 24,000 years.

The plutonium contaminated our soil, water, crops, livestock, grazing land, wildlife and people. Our water sources included rain barrels, cisterns, holding ponds, lakes, streams, and ditches. In July people would have been working outside most of the day. Unknowing, innocent victims were growing their own food, hunting, and working with livestock. Children were playing outside all day. No one was officially warned then, afterwards, or since, of the danger.

Our suffering is obscured on many levels. A heavily footnoted article by Kathleen M. Tucker and Robert Alvarez titled “Trinity: The Most Significant Hazard of the Entire Manhattan Project” in the July 15, 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reports a horrendous spike in infant deaths after Trinity. The infant mortality rate for 1945 in New Mexico was 100.8 per 1,000 live births, the highest in the country! Prior to 1945, the infant mortality rate had been on a 10-year decline.

Since the federal government refuses to study the deaths of our babies, we are forced to do it ourselves. We have researched available New Mexico death certificates and church records for 1945 and found that hundreds of babies died in 1945. In one instance, in Santa Rita Catholic church in Carrizozo, forty miles from ground zero, we found a 350% percent spike in infant mortality.

What you can do

Help us shine a light on this hidden history. Support the documentary “First We Bombed New Mexico” by Lois Lipman which is nearing distribution and still needs funds to complete. Please also plan to attend our art exhibit “Trinity, Legacies of Nuclear Testing” in Las Cruces, New Mexico July 15 to September 23, 2023. Stand with us in solidarity as we hold our annual Candlelight Vigil on the evening of July 15, 2023. If you cannot be with us in-person please place a luminaria at your home. As the government ignores us, we fear the upcoming movie, Oppenheimer, will ignore us as well. Through the film’s Facebook page, encourage the producers to add a clip of our history after their credit roll. And please encourage everyone to visit our web site at www.trinitydownwinders.com to keep track of our progress, and to make a donation.

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Drive for Illegal Uranium Mining in New Mexico; Cleanup Obligations Unfulfilled

By Leona Morgan

Due to the push for climate solutions and the geopolitics currently at work in Ukraine, there is increased interest in producing uranium for both energy and weapons, threatening those living near uranium sites. Regardless of its end use, new or increased uranium mining results in the same death and destruction for frontline communities, with no guarantee of proper cleanup or compensation.

In 2014, the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining with many others successfully prevented new uranium extraction in northwestern New Mexico, a few miles south of the 1979 Churchrock Uranium Spill site.

A warning sign is seen next to the entry to the Northeast Church Rock uranium mine in Pinedale, New Mexico, U.S. July 19, 2018. Picture taken July 19, 2018. REUTERS/Pamela J. Peters.

That project was first licensed approximately 30 years ago, and stopped by decades of community resistance that created layers of Navajo Nation policy: the 2005 Diné Natural Resources Protection Act which prohibits new uranium mining, and the 2012 Radioactive Materials Transportation Act limiting transport of new radioactive products. There is also a 2012 legally binding agreement between the Navajo Nation and the previous company which requires cleanup of existing contamination on other lands before starting new mining activities.

After the mining project was stopped, Laramide Resources Ltd. acquired the land and necessary U.S. federal and state permits to do in situ leach mining near Churchrock, and uranium processing in Crownpoint, New Mexico at its central processing facility.

In late 2022, Diné community members reported that Laramide Resources was illegally drilling for uranium in the Churchrock area. The site was active with equipment and workers, but has since been vacated. Laramide’s drilling samples were transported 40 miles to Crownpoint, for testing in preparation of mining. All these activities now violate Navajo Nation law.

Nearby, separate yet interconnected, the Red Water Pond Road Community Association (RWPR) and others continue to challenge General Electric’s “cleanup” plan, which is to move uranium mine wastes on top of the unlined 1979 Churchrock Uranium Spill site waste, both in close proximity to Diné residents (See Summer 2021 Nukewatch Quarterly for more info). The “cleanup” of more highly radioactive wastes would be to move them to the White Mesa uranium mill in southeast Utah. RWPR demands that uranium wastes be removed from the community completely and not in a way that could possibly set up conditions for a second Churchrock Spill. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the Final Environmental Impact Statement in January greenlighting the cleanup plan.

Every year, the RWPR hosts a gathering to reflect on the 1979 Churchrock Uranium Spill and ongoing work to protect their community. This year, RWPR invites the public to the Annual Uranium Legacy Remembrance and Action Day on July 15, 2023 starting with a prayer walk at 7 a.m., 12 miles north of Red Rock State Park on State Road 566 near Churchrock, New Mexico.

— NM Political Report, May 1; Counter Punch, April 28; Laramide Resources, March 24; Federal Register, Jan. 13, 2023

— Leona Morgan (she/her) is a Diné activist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Uranium Mining

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