 Welcome, viewers, to our ongoing program, Nuclear Free Future Conversation, coming to you from Burlington, Vermont, here in the Channel 17 Center for Media and Democracy TV Studio. And I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, for the Nuclear Free Future Conversation. We've been going on for over 10 years, and we have a very special guest returning to us, Kevin Camps, from Beyond Nuclear. Welcome back, Kevin Camps. Thank you, Margaret, good to be here. Yes, thank you so much for returning, Kevin, with all of the crucial issues that you present to us and the insight that you give to us, which is vital to our understanding of what is happening in the nuclear world. And unfortunately, we are living in this nuclear world. And could you just recap for us what Beyond Nuclear is about? Well, we're a national and even international anti-nuclear organization. And truth be told, we're largely focused on the nuclear power side of the coin. But there's so much overlap that we've got nuclear weapons issues as well. And we have our various focus areas, reactor risks in the United States, radioactive waste risks, the risk of radioactivity to human health. And then, like I said, the international scene, not just Canada, but even overseas as well. Thank you, Kevin. And the title of our program is Poisoning the Well. So this is a vital issue about nuclear waste. So please explain, Kevin, what is the issue that's right in our face right now about the dumping of nuclear waste into the Great Lakes? Yeah, well, I'm from Michigan, and that's where I got started in anti-nuclear power activism was in my home of Kalamazoo, Michigan, because a local atomic reactor that I barely knew was there growing up, Palisades, ran out of room for its high-level radioactive waste in its storage pool indoors. And so it started plunking dry casks on the beach of Lake Michigan, just 150 yards from the water. And I love Lake Michigan. It's sacred to me. And so that's how I got involved in anti-nuclear power activism. And I've stayed on the board of directors all these decades now for Don't Waste Michigan, the statewide anti-nuclear coalition. And way back in 2001, we heard the first whispers of this insane proposal by Ontario power generation, which is the major power utility in Canada, to target the Great Lakes shoreline, specifically the shoreline of Lake Huron, which is just east of Michigan. If you can imagine the thumb of Michigan, tip of the thumb and goes straight east across Lake Huron. And located there is Ontario power generations. Nuclear plant called Bruce, Nuclear Generating Station, with a total of nine reactors on one site, the biggest nuclear power plant in the world in terms of number of reactors. And that's right where they want to do this radioactive waste dumping. So what is it, 19 years now, we've been fighting this proposal. And there was just a major announcement made, not only are we fighting a so-called low level and highly radioactive, intermediate level radioactive waste dump right at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. But now, again, Ontario power generation really is driving this. They've announced that the high level radioactive waste dump for Canada has been narrowed to two sites that they're considering for this dump. One is northwest of Lake Superior by 150 miles. So if you can imagine Minnesota, go straight north, it's called Ignis, Ontario. It's in Ojibwe First Nation territory. And the other location, surprise, surprise, is very close to Bruce Nuclear Generating Station near the Lake Huron shoreline. Two small towns called Huron Kinloss and the other is called South Bruce. So really, if they choose to do it all near or on the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, it would be a national radioactive waste dump for all of Canada. Again, on Ojibwe land, there it's called the Sogine Ojibwe Nation. And as we record this interview tomorrow, on January 31st, 2020, the Sogine Ojibwe Nation is holding a referendum among their community, 5,000 people, whether or not to accept a bribe from Ontario power generation of $150 million. And then if they say yes, they will be expected to not only host one or more dumps on their territory, but to be enthusiastic about it. And so we're waiting to see how that community decides. But even if they decide to accept the money, we will have to continue to fight tooth and nail against this proposal. Kevin, how is this proposal different from the one from several over a decade ago? And why isn't the Canadian government in control of this situation? Technically, the Canadian government is in control, whether it's the province of Ontario, which Ontario power generation is owned by the province, actually, it's a crown corporation. They tried to privatize it decades ago, but it didn't really work. So it's still provincially owned. And of course, the federal government of Canada, as in the form of its Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is their version of our US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they have to approve these proposals. But unfortunately, Ontario power generation, which has a grand total of 20 reactors, actually 21, if you include the prototype at Bruce, 21 reactors in Ontario. They really not only run the province, not just electrically, but politically and economically. And because Ontario is the most populous Canadian province in a sense, they run the country. And they're the tail wagging the dog. And the Saugino-Jibway Nation, I mean, this is a deep environmental justice question. They've been forced to host against their will from the start in the 1960s, really, with the prototype reactor at Bruce. They've been forced to host this nuclear power plant, the biggest in the world, and all of its downsides. They've gotten very little to nothing in return for that. So yes, they deserve to be paid more than $150 million by Ontario power generation for all the suffering that they've had to go through. But they certainly shouldn't be forced to consent, to say yes to this dump or multiple dumps that are targeted at them. So we certainly sympathize with their predicament. And one of the members of Congress from Michigan, Dan Kildey, who's been a real leader in fighting these dumps on the Great Lakes shores, he's from Flint. If that gives you any, he cares so much. Flint, after its drinking water catastrophe, returned to the Metro Detroit municipal drinking water system. And guess where their water comes from? It comes from Lake Huron, which is relatively pristine drinking water. So Congressman Kildey, on behalf of his constituents in Flint, who've already suffered a drinking water catastrophe, they don't want these risks on the very edge of their drinking water supply, Lake Huron. And hence the name poisoning the well, Lake Huron and the rest of the Great Lakes is the drinking water supply for 40 million people in both countries and a large number of Native American First Nations. And Dan Kildey has asked the Canadian decision makers in the vastness of your country and Canada is second only to Russia in terms of land mass. You can't find a better place than the shoreline of Lake Huron for radioactive waste dumping. So the fight is back on with this announcement a couple months ago that not only low and intermediate level radioactive waste, which is bad enough, believe you me, but now high level radioactive waste is being targeted at the Great Lakes shores. And it's not just an issue for the eight Great Lakes states, especially Michigan, which is surrounded by the Great Lakes, thankfully. We love it. It's really an issue for our entire country, for both our countries, the US and Canada and the entire world. The Great Lakes is 84% of North America's surface fresh water and it's 21% of the world's surface fresh water. And we cannot take these kind of risks with that much precious, safe drinking water. Well, it's all well and good for the congressman to ask that question, like why is this going on and what can we do about it? But what clout does an American congressperson have with the Ontario or the Canadian government, the Canadian power, the Canadian power plant? A little curd goes a long way and I'd like to harken back to the mid-1980s when Vermont was targeted by the US Department of Energy at seven different locations for the US national high-level radioactive waste dump. That then a few years later focused on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Western Shoshone, Indian land. But when it was still looking at seven sites in Vermont, two sites in New Hampshire, including Hillsborough and one site in Maine, Sobego Lake, there was a clamor on the Canadian side at the highest levels of their government. Because one of those sites in Vermont that was being targeted was a shared water basin between Vermont and Canada. And the Canadian leadership at the highest national level said, hey, hold on a minute, this is a shared water basin. You can't do this without consulting us, without our consent. And they created enough pushback that guess what? That site was taken off the list as were all the sites in Vermont. It wasn't just because of Canada's pushback, but it was a precedent that was set that we have harkened back to. And the current congressional resolution led by the likes of Congressman Kildey and Senators Stabenaw and Peters from Michigan. But a bicameral and bipartisan congressional caucus is pushing back. There's House Resolution 805. There's Senate Resolution 470. A sense of Congress saying don't dump radioactive waste in the Great Lakes Basin. And they actually cite that Canadian pushback on the Vermont border there from the 1980s saying, hey, look, Canada objected to dumping radioactive waste in a shared water basin. Well, the biggest shared water basin between our two countries is the Great Lakes. So it's a powerful argument that they've put out there. They're calling on the President and the Secretary of State to do all they can with their Canadian cohorts to put a stop to this. And hey, if we can renew NAFTA, this new US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement, how about protecting one of the biggest bioregional economic zones in the world that is the Great Lakes economic zone? Something like $65 billion of economic activity coming out of the Great Lakes economic zone. If you go all the way from the Western Great Lakes all the way out to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence, you're talking one of the biggest regional economic zones in the world that could be ruined by a radioactive catastrophe at a shoreline dump site. And Kevin, could you go into Prime Minister Trudeau's support for this dumping? Why is that? He was just re-elected. And what's going on politically there to give them a push to, again, propose to dump the nuclear waste in the Great Lakes? Right. On surface level, you'd think that somebody like Trudeau, who's so charismatic and popular, or at least he was previously, would just put a stop to this immediately. But no. And a part of it goes back in history. The Liberal Party that he represents, which is a middle-of-the-road, somewhat conservative party, has been nuclear for a very long time. And there are progressive parties in Canada, like the New Democratic Party. Even the Green Party has a couple of three members of the National Parliament, including an anti-nuclear leader who's leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, who is a board member of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, going back a long time. And so there is major pushback in Canada against this, but there's largely silence, or worse, from Trudeau's Liberal Party. And incredibly, you know, being in the thick of this fight for so long, I have to say the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and now appointed by Trudeau, he's the decision-maker, makes the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission look better, which is really hard to do because the NRC is so bad. The CNSC is even worse. They are even more beholden to the nuclear power industry of Canada. So what it's going to take is major clamor from both sides of the border on Prime Minister Trudeau, and that's exactly what this congressional resolution is calling for, is for President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo to do everything in their power to tell the Canadians, hey, look, this is not acceptable, we need to work together. There are treaties like the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 that call for protection of the Great Lakes. There are bi-national bodies like the International Joint Mission. The unfortunate thing that gets to the heart of your question is the nuclear power industry, whether it's in Ontario, whether it's on the US side, is very politically powerful. And they get these international bodies like the International Joint Commission, which are supposed to protect the Great Lakes, to largely silence themselves in regards to the subject matter. But there have been great exceptions to that, like when Rosalie Bertel was on the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Task Force, and they did some major publications, like how much radioactivity, artificial radioactivity, is in the Great Lakes from nuclear weapons bomb fallout to nuclear power plant emissions. They did tremendous work. They looked at the biomagnification of radioactive contamination in the Great Lakes, and they were about to do a human health impact study on these questions. When they were shut down, it never happened because the nuclear power industry on both sides of the border said, nope, that ain't going to happen. And what about the potential for the people, the activists, to stop this from happening? We have a lot of potential. We really showed up in a big way to fight off that low and intermediate level radioactive waste dump, which is still in play, unfortunately. That's what this referendum vote at the Saugino-Jibway Nation tomorrow is about. And there were years and years of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission joint review panels, their highest level environmental review, which we had to win in the first place to get it looked at with that much care. And it's a very rigged process, but we showed up in a big way. Just one example, a group of neighbors of the Kin Cardin, Ontario targeted sites formed a group called Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, and another group of neighbors called SOS Great Lakes, Save Our Sauging Shores, SOS. They all formed and Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump worked both sides of the border, and long story short, they generated or helped to generate, at this point, 223 resolutions, representing over 23 million Great Lakes residents on both sides of the border saying, don't do this. And in fact, it's their slogan, would you bury poison beside your well. They've done tremendous work, and the people of the Great Lakes have spoken. That's more than half the population of the Great Lakes have officially passed resolutions saying, no, don't do this. And it's held it off, but Ontario Power Generation in its stubbornness, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission in its complicity, keep at it, keep coming back. And we, of course, will not back down. We have to stop this. And when you say the people of the Great Lakes have spoken, is that on both sides of the border? Is that the Canadians and the Americans? Yeah, it's both sides of the border. It's every state and every province impacted, and many of the counties and the cities, incredibly enough, Ontario Power Generation is headquartered in Toronto. Toronto City passed one of these resolutions. And even places like the company town of Davis Bessie, Ohio, Port Clinton passed a resolution. The city of Chicago, which is the headquarters of Exxalon Nuclear, the biggest American nuclear utility passed a resolution. So, you know, what it's saying is, you know, the nuclear power industry in the United States is pretty crazy in terms of taking high risks. Even they are saying, this is a crazy proposal. They've never proposed, I should take that back. There have been proposals on the US side to dump the country's high level radioactive waste in the Great Lakes Basin, but it goes back to like 1957 when the National Academy of Sciences was looking at Metro Detroit, at the salt formations under Metro Detroit. And I think that they wised up that that's probably a bad idea. Too much risk there. So, even the US nuclear power industry is saying, this is nuts. So what will stop them from dumping into the Great Lakes? People power, you know, environmental justice, solidarity with the Soggy and Ojibwe Nation have already suffered so much, not just from nuclear, but one of their leaders spoke at one of these dump hearings in Canada and spoke about how in recent decades, I think it was in the 1950s, there was an unwritten law up there on the Bruce Peninsula that the Soggy and Ojibwe had better not wander off the reservation after dark, or they would pay for it. And he was referring to lynchings that occurred up there. So there's a deep racist past around there. So we have to work with the Soggy and Ojibwe Nation. We have to work with the Ojibwe of Manitoulin Island, which is in Northern Lake Huron, one of the biggest Ojibwe communities in the entire Great Lakes basin to achieve environmental justice reforms because up there at Manitoulin Island, they are on the receiving end of massive uranium mining fallout. The Serpent River First Nation, another Ojibwe community, the uranium mining around Elliot Lake, Ontario was right in the heart of their community. And essentially it ruined their traditional lifestyle. The livestock, not livestock, the wildlife, like moose are too contaminated to this day to consume. And so it's been, essentially it's been a cultural genocide against their people. And not just that, but a lot of their folks have also died of their exposure to radiation in the form of cancer and other diseases. I was part of a book project called, This Is My Homeland, about the suffering of the Serpent River First Nation downstream and right in the middle of this uranium mining for Canada's nuclear industry. And the environmental director of the Serpent River First Nation, Keith Lewis, put it this way. He said, there's nothing moral about tempting a starving man with money. And that's what happened to the Serpent River First Nation. The uranium mining industry said, hey, we've got jobs for you. And they were low income. So they entered into this industry. They were given the worst jobs, the highest exposures, not warned about the dangers, not just to the miners, but to the nearby communities at the surface. So here we go again with Ontario Power Generation offering $150 million to the Soggy Nojibwe Nation to allow radioactive waste dumping on their sacred shorelines. And there's nothing moral about tempting a starving man with money. And so, yes, they should get that money, but it should not force them to accept posting this worst poison that humans have ever generated. Kevin, where is the nuclear waste now that has been accumulating for decades? Where is it now that it could be moved right into the Great Lakes? Yeah, that's the dilemma is, it is on the Great Lakes shorelines. There are dozens of atomic reactors on both the US and Canadian shores of the Great Lakes. And then Canada has other reactors like in Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River. That's Jean T. And in New Brunswick, that Point Le Pro. So if the high level radioactive waste dump for Canada is on the Great Lakes shoreline, they'll be importing high level wastes from other provinces. So it is on the Great Lakes shores at some 20 reactors in Ontario and lots of reactors on the US side too. And that's an ironic development. These bad bills in the US Congress right now like 82699 on the House side and S2917 on the Senate side, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. And unfortunately, Peter Welch from Vermont has voted for this legislation in the past. So we're hoping he'll change his position on this because of the environmental justice violations alone. But an amendment was added to HR 2699 when it passed the Energy and Commerce Committee in November 2019. It was a resolution, not unlike the one I previously described the Great Lakes Protection Resolution. It was introduced by Congressman Upton, a Republican from Michigan and Congresswoman Dingle, a Democrat from Michigan. And what it says is you can't long-term store or dispose of high level radioactive waste in the Great Lakes. And really it's pointing a finger at Canada saying don't do it. The irony, and we have called them on this hypocrisy, is that Congressman Upton especially who's been in Congress since 1986 from my home community of Kalamazoo, he has no problem, atomic reactors operating in his district. There are three of them. And then beyond that elsewhere on the US side of the Great Lakes, he has no problem with the generation of high level radioactive waste on the Great Lakes shore. He has defied his constituents who've called for action to be taken about the risks of long-term storage of high level radioactive waste in his district on the shore of Lake Michigan. So it's very hypocritical of him to be saying this. Really it boils down to a very nimby, not in my backyard. Yes, we've generated it. Yes, we've made money on it, but now it has to leave. And in terms of this congressional bill, it's targeting yet again, native land in Nevada, Western Shoshone land at Yucca Mountain. And this time around, instead of targeting Native American reservations, like in the past, it's targeting Hispanic communities on either side of the border of Texas and New Mexico. It's unacceptable, it's hypocritical. What we call for is that these atomic reactors on the US side, on the Canadian side, be shut down, be phased out, be replaced with renewables and efficiency because the risks of generating these wastes, long-term storage at a place like Palisades in Southwest Michigan since 1971, that's long-term storage. And Congressman Upton's been all for it. He's been the biggest cheerleader of the nuclear power industry in the House of Representatives for his entire career. So those are the kind of devilish details we work out. Nimbism is not acceptable, environmental racism, radioactive racism is not acceptable. And what about dry cask storage, Kevin? Is that in playing out on the Canadian side at all? Do they have dry cask storage there? Yes, the pools in Canada, just like in the United States are full, and they have to unload at least the oldest waste, the coolest waste, the most radioactively decayed waste into outdoor dry cask storage. In fact, in Canada, they're a bit better than us because they require, at this point going forward, that those dry casks be inside a building, which on one level prevents certain terrorist attack scenarios like firing an anti-tank missile at them because the attackers can't exactly see where they are. We don't have that on the US side. Our dry casks are right out in plain sight. So they do use dry cask storage. In fact, the Western Waste Management Facility at Bruce Nuclear Generating Station is one of the single largest dry cask storage schemes in the world. The figure is something like 2,000 dry casks are proposed at Bruce Nuclear. And that's just an interim storage until they can dump it somewhere. And right now they're proposing just down the road in some nearby communities if they choose to go that route. What about the danger of terrorists attacking dry cask storage? Is that an issue? Yeah, your guests from Citizens Awareness Network recently on your show, Deb Katz, commissioned a study way back in 2003 by Dr. Gordon Thompson of Cambridge, Massachusetts. And he's been one of the clearest voices for a long time that dry casks themselves are vulnerable. And so the hardened onsite storage symposium that took place in Middleton, Connecticut back in April of 2002 where Arjun Makajani coined the phrase and Gordon Thompson then did this full-length technical report. They have been calling for fortifications against terrorist attack on the dry cask storage this past two decades. And it's largely not happened at all in the United States as I mentioned. There's some exceptions. Prairie Island, Minnesota and Palo Verde, Arizona are a couple nuclear power plants that at least put in urban burming these dirt walls surrounding the dry cask storage. So again, line of sight attack by anti-tank missiles would be precluded by that. But it has to be even better than that. But those are the only two exceptions in the whole country where they've done anything in this regard. So it is a serious issue. And it's why more than 200 environmental groups in all 50 states and we have Canadian support in the environmental movement there have called for hardened onsite storage as near as possible to the point of generation. There's concern on Lake Michigan right now that the shoreline is a road into the Great Lakes. It's probably climate related, although there's been erosion for decades, even centuries. And there's even, you know, it's poo-pooed, but there's even risk of tsunamis on the Great Lakes. In fact, when I was up there at Bruce for these hearings I mentioned, one of our side events that we organized was in a town not far from Kincardin that was hit by a natural disaster in 1913. It's referred to as the White Hurricane of 1913. It was a blizzard, actually. It's the greatest loss of life on the Great Lakes in recorded history, many hundreds died. What this blizzard did was it forced a 40 foot wall of water into this community. And again, this is close to Bruce nuclear generating station. So if they were to build this radioactive waste dump at Bruce and there would be an entry tunnel at the surface, if a 40 foot wall of water were to hit that entry tunnel, it could flood the tunnel or any surface facilities where high level radioactive waste would be located, which includes currently dry cast storage. And so what hardened onsite storage calls for is as safely as possible, as near as possible to the point in generation. If there are places where erosion or tsunamis are a risk, then perhaps further inland to higher ground is required. So those are the kind of conversations we need to have in North America. Thank you, Kevin, for this conversation, which has made us alert and aware, you again awakened us to this issue that is timely. And we're running out of time as the doomsday clock has told us and that the activism of people like the Plowshares Seven, who did the, well, Kevin, could you talk a little bit about the Plowshares Seven, who are re-enacting really the resistance to nuclear weapons, which was originated by the original Plowshares people. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven, this was the 100th Plowshares action since 1980. And the Berrigan brothers were founders of the Plowshares movement. And Liz McAllister, Phil Berrigan's widow is one of the Plowshares Seven right now. They did an action at the Kings Bay Trident Submarine Base in Georgia, which is a major nuclear weapons base. It's the East Coast Nuclear Submarine Base for the United States. It's been hiding there really for decades with little attention and they brought some attention to it on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. So they really dedicated their action to the memory of Martin Luther King and his warnings about the triple evils of militarism and materialism and racism. And they are now facing 20 plus years in prison if the book is thrown at them for their nonviolent direct action. And so blessings upon them for their good work and our hopes and prayers and thoughts are with them as they are on the brink of sentencing right now. Yes, and they are direct descendants, including one of the members of Dorothy Day and of the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and of Peter Moran, Peter Moran from France who came down through Canada and who helped to found the Catholic Worker Union, Catholic Worker Movement and also initiated the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was initiated by Peter Moran in the United States in during the Depression years. So all of this has historical connections and we're all connected in this. And thank you so much, Kevin, for waking us up and keeping us awake and for your action every day. Thank you. Yes, remarkably, one of the plowshare seven is Martha Hennessey who is Dorothy Day's granddaughter. Yes, yes. This is history and activism all coming together and continuing on. They're certainly not remnants as one of them, one of them describe themselves as remnants in one of the videos that I saw that you sent me. Oh no, they're living, living activists and so strong. Like you, Kevin. As we approach St. Bridget's Day in Ireland, it's a sacred fire. And actually the Dibway, their sibling tribe, the Potawatomi, their name means keepers of the fire. So it's a sacred fire that the plowshares movement has kept burning. Yes. Thank you so much, Kevin Camps from Beyond Nuclear. Until next time and we will be activists because you are waking us up and leading us forward. Thank you so much. Until next time, Kevin Camps. Goodbye for now. Thank you so much.