On The Bright Side

April 2, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Spring 2018 Nukewatch Quarterly Newsletter

Click the links below to access articles from our Spring 2018 Quarterly Newsletter. Page numbers show the pdf version of each page. Individual articles are also tagged by issue category.

Dismantling the Nuclear Beast in New Mexico

By Leona Morgan

Spring Quarterly 2018

The Albuquerque-based Nuclear Issues Study Group (NISG), formed in June 2016 “To Protect New Mexico from All Things Nuclear.” NISG came together in response to the lack of young organizers, young activists, and people of color at the forefront of nuclear issues affecting New Mexico. We live in a state that is targeted by the nuclear/industrial complex and we see this as environmental racism. We are primarily concerned about new threats of uranium mining, weapons modernization, and nuclear waste dumping, while many long-standing issues remain unaddressed. We emphasize the need for a new way to reach out to young people, with a focus on recruiting a new generation of New Mexicans to get involved in resisting every level of the deadly nuclear fuel chain.

The co-founders, Eileen Shaughnessy and I, wanted to bring the perspectives of a more diverse and younger population to the decision-making table of national organizing against nuclear proliferation. Eileen started a class within the Sustainability Studies Program at the University of New Mexico (UNM) called “Nuclear New Mexico”—now in its 7th semester. The class gives students an honest history of nuclear colonialism in our state, as well as a pathway into activism. I have more than a decade of experience organizing against uranium mining on indigenous lands. Between the two of us, we’ve been able to tap into a wide network of resources and support to start NISG.

The symposium explored every aspect of the nuclear fuel chain—past, current, and future—as well as highlight some key threats to New Mexico that Nuclear Issues Study Group is focusing on including: Sandia National Laboratories’ Mixed Waste Landfill and the proposed Centralized “Interim” Storage of high-level radioactive waste.

In December 2017, we held our first major event, an educational gathering called “Dismantling the Nuclear Beast: Connecting Local Work to the National Movement.” The symposium featured over 60 organizers, artists, and student presenters, and welcomed more than 200 attendees from across the country. We heard directly from indigenous leaders, organizers, and community members impacted by various stages of the nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining and milling, to bomb building at Los Alamos and Sandia National labs. Down-winders of the Trinity bomb blast in 1945, and students from Ukraine and Japan—places devastated by nuclear disasters—presented as well. We also had guests from the East Coast and the Deep South who are confronting nuclear reactor and radioactive waste issues. (Videos available on YouTube.com.)

Since then, we have been steadily focused on resisting the proposed Centralized “Interim” Storage, aka “CIS” of high-level radioactive waste in the area. NISG proudly participated in the 2018 New Mexico Legislative Session, helping to educate legislators about the threat of CIS and asking them to intervene on the issue. Currently, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is processing an application from Holtec International to build a CIS facility between Carlsbad and Hobbs, a “temporary” dump that would hold all of the nation’s waste uranium fuel from commercial nuclear reactors for up to 120 years. In a collaborative effort, NISG worked with UNM students, New Mexico activists and organizers, the SEED Coalition from Texas, and legislators on a letter urging the NRC to slow down the licensing process and allow more time to thoroughly study how this facility and waste transport could impact New Mexico. In total, 21 representatives and nine senators signed on to this letter! Along with local community members, we will present the letter and our concerns at this spring’s public hearings to show how, collectively, we believe that nationwide waste transports and dumping on New Mexico are injustices that must be addressed on local, state, and national levels. We will continue to work toward stopping additional radioactive waste from being created in our state, as well as keeping it from being transported and dumped here.

—Leona Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico.

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

2017 Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Nuclear Abolitionists

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for its successful effort to establish the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Peace, disarmament, and civil society groups around the world celebrated the announcement and congratulated ICAN for its landmark treaty accomplishment.

“[ICAN] is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic [health and environmental] consequences of any use of nuclear weapons, and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,”stated the Nobel Committee.

ICAN called the prize “a tribute to the tireless efforts of many millions of campaigners and concerned citizens worldwide who, ever since the dawn of the atomic age, have loudly protested nuclear weapons, insisting that they can serve no legitimate purpose and must be forever banished from the face of our earth.” By employing grass roots organizing and ordinary citizen diplomacy, ICAN, with Nukewatch among its 468 partner organizations from 101 countries, has permanently stigmatized nuclear weapons and their possessor governments, and helped move the world closer to their eventual elimination.

By outlawing all aspects of the Bomb’s possession and use, nuclear weapons join a growing list of prohibited devices that “kill or wound treacherously,” including biological weapons, chemical weapons, poison gas, land mines, and cluster bombs. The new ban treaty was concluded on July 7 when 122 United Nations member states voted in favor of its adoption. Since Sept. 20, 53 individual heads-of-state have signed the treaty, 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Nuclear Abolitionists the first step in a government’s process of ratification which is decided by individual national parliaments. It will enter in force 90 days after at least 50 countries have ratified it.

Mexico’s senate voted unanimously Nov. 28 to ratify the treaty. The United States, the most powerful opponent of the ban, called the treaty negotiations “unrealistic,” and the US ambassador to the UN, Gov. Nikki Haley, led a boycott even though the talks were required under an explicit mandate (Art. VI) of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed and ratified by the United States in 1970. Although the UN boycott led by the United States flies in the face of decades of presidential promises to seek “a world without nuclear weapons, the US, UK and France said in a joint statement in July, “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it.”

The Nobel committee’s choice appeared to directly confront the obstructionism by the US and the eight other nuclear armed states. As the Nuclear Threat Initiative noted, “The award was seen as a rebuke to nuclear weapons states and their allies who oppose the treaty.”

The ban treaty prohibits developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, possessing, stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons, transferring or receiving them from others, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, allowing any stationing or deployment of nuclear weapons on national territories of signatories, and assisting, encouraging, or inducing any of these prohibited acts. And it requires each signatory state to develop “legal, administrative and other measures, including the imposition of penal sanctions, to prevent and suppress” the prohibited activities.

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Elected Officials Slam Canadian Radioactive Waste Dump Plan

More than 100 Great Lakes mayors and elected officials want the Canadian government to say ‘No’ to a plan to bury radioactive waste within one mile of Lake Huron at the Bruce Nuclear station in Kincardine, Ontario.
The officials from both sides of the US-Canadian border slammed Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) plan in a Nov. 30, 2017 letter to Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna. McKenna has twice pushed back against OPG’s proposal, demanding extensive and more detailed answers to questions about the advisability of the near-lake location.

The open letter from mayors said OPG’s proposal to bury the waste so near Lake Huron “threatens the water supply of 40 million people” and notes that 230 resolutions having been passed by local, county and state governments representing over 23 million people opposing the construction of the dump.

Traverse City, Michigan Mayor Jim Carruthers who signed the letter, told Michigan Public Radio, “We know that there are other available sites in Canada that could house this kind of waste that are not so close…. That’s why I speak out for our environment and for our fresh water.”

The letter to McKenna is the latest in a series of efforts to oppose OPG’s plan by citizen groups and more than 200 local governments on both sides of the border in the Great Lakes area. Forty-six of the 104 signers of the letter were Michigan elected officials.

The letter said in part, “We find it irresponsible and deeply troubling that OPG failed and continues to refuse to investigate any other actual sites for its proposed nuclear waste repository despite being required to do so under regulatory guidelines and further as required by you in your Feb. 18, 2016, request.”

—Michigan Public Radio; and “Open Letter,” from 104 mayors to Minister McKenna, Port Huron, MI Times Herald, Nov. 30, 2017

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Nuclear Shorts

By Leona Morgan

Spring Quarterly 2018

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected