 I would like to ask Charlie to come up and Charlie Magasso and I would like him to come up and do a little prayer for us, an opening prayer. Charlie is part of the Nolhegan Kusak tribe and he works with the Aonobanui group, which is a cultural tradition, non-profit organization. So we'll start with that and then we'll do other introductions. God, great spirit, tabledak. We thank you. We're beside our ancient great river, the Manuskuk. In this field and forest of our homeland, we honor and adore you. The great spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The great spirit is our father, but the earth is our mother. She nourishes us. That which we put into the ground, she returns to us. The land acknowledgement here for the people here. The Manuskuk in this geographical part of the Dakinov, our homeland, today is Vermont. It's the border between two people, the Nolhegan Kusak tribe and the Elnu tribe just to the south. These are the territories of the people that exist here today and live and survive here. Eventually we'd like to have signs put up that say the territory of to start that conversation with people about who are these people? Are they still here? Whose land is this? What are we doing sharing together? That is the whole process that is in front of us today and our children. We have a person here today, the owner Morgan, a Pene original person who's come to our territory to talk about a very, very important subject about nuclear waste. Vermont commission down here Yankee commission, the plan that they're taking apart. They've invited our Elnu tribe to participate in it. They never asked us in the beginning and we're going to build it. What our opinion is, what we think of it, much less the people who live here. The legislature who said that we're not going to allow them to store cask of uranium waste here in the state of Vermont and they did it knowing full well that this is what was going to happen here. Your own people have been colonized. This happens repeatedly in history, especially with subjects of national interest. These are the things that that vex us today that continue the struggle, not just for original peoples, but for everybody who lives here in this land. It affects all of us. I didn't get poisoned just like the rest of you. This is why we're here today. This is why this is going to be discussed tonight. This is why I hope we can get the attention of more people in these endeavors. We have our own problems here in the state of Vermont. The eastern side of what you call your green mountains and places of the towns north of here, places like Huntington, the wells are drying up. Good water is starting, just starting to be harder and harder to find. You have municipalities here who want to continue to issue building permits. Yet every time it rains they let the effluence from their sewer plants into Bedabock the water that lies between the place that they call Champlain that supposedly was discovered. We all share in this water. We're all stewards here today to take care of it. We need to hold our local people who run things responsible for this to make them do these things just like it has to be done on a national level in terms of nuclear waste. One issue is not bigger than the other. They're the same. They're treated the same. These are the things that we must look at and we must talk about and speak out about. I also want to welcome the people and the organizations that came here. Deb Cates, Diane Durego and these people that have started this national tour, that have invited the original peoples here to talk about this problem that's going to happen on the other side of this continent to these other original peoples once again. They don't want this waste but yet they're being told too bad you're going to have to live this way. These are the things that we thought about here in New England especially to keep agriculture, to keep the things that were dear to us that we were all brought into in this life that we remember and cherish. These people over there on the other side of this country have a place to live and they cherish their upbringing and where they live. Why is that any different? These are the fights that we talk about today. These are the things that we need to try and bring to the greater community to let them know that what happens here is no different than what's happening over there and this has to stop. There has to be more of a collective discussion and ways of dealing with these things. That's up to us today from here forward. I welcome the people that are here. I welcome the other people here also who are fighting this good fight. I thank you for this opportunity tonight to welcome and to let you know whose land we all share today. So we're going to start the evening with Deb and Deb's going to lay the groundwork. Deb Katz is the executive director of CAN, Citizens Awareness Network, which is based in Rowe, Massachusetts. Shelburne Falls. They single-handedly shut down Rowe Yankee and we thank them for that. So I'm going to begin with something that I want you to think about which is do we have a right to clean air, water, land, and the same place to inhabit? Is that a right? Is it a right for everyone? And I want you to keep this in mind as I give you a history of nuclear power and its waste and where we are now because most of it isn't known and I've been at this for years and I was clueless about a lot of it. So when nuclear power began there wasn't much thought given to the issue of disposal. They believed the problem would solve itself through the development of breeder reactors coupled with reprocessing. Breeder reactors could create fissionable materials supplying the industry with an endless source of uranium. This was a fantasy that went on. Of course the only reprocessing facility in the United States and upstate New York shuttered within five years due to operational problems. It remains a super fun site to this day and instead of shipping waste off to New York State every site in fact has been accumulating nuclear waste since that time without any solution. In the 1970s after this idea that nuclear was going to create a wonderful world where we could basically worship our refrigerators there was a recession and the electricity dropped sharply. Nuclear cost increased and the nuclear capacity basically stalled and reactors they haven't been new reactors really built since then. There were a couple now and then India a non-signatory to the the nuclear non-proliferation treaty tested a nuclear device. This is in 1974. Prior to that the feeling was that they had to deal with bad actors potentially in terms of reprocessing and getting a hold of nuclear materials but the Indian test created concerns about the creation of a global arms race and so the breed reactor went from being a magical energy source to an unnecessary dangerous proliferation problem and proliferation actually became a political issue. I know it's shocking in 1976 when during the presidential election and then Governor Carter expressed doubts about pursuing reprocessing because of the issue of proliferation. When Carter announced the in after he became president he announced the indefinite deferral of reprocessing and suspension of government support for the development of the technology. That's when spent fuel became a waste management problem. That's the first time they began to think of waste as a problem. It's sort of shocking isn't it? That until then nobody thought of it except it was going to be great. So the Carter commission Carter administration commissioned an environmental impact study to in fact look at the long-term disposal of nuclear waste and the final environmental impact study was published in 1980 and what followed from that was the nuclear waste policy act of 82 which was amended in 87 is basically the operative law to this day. So disposal approaches were examined in this 1980s environmental impact study and I'm going to go into a few because it would be important to have a sense of how people were thinking at that time. What is remarkable is a mixture of arrogance, naivety, denial and thoughtlessness that went into the proposal to deal with the most dangerous waste we've ever created. So one was to shoot it into space. What could go? Shooting tens and thousands of tons of high-level waste into space would require a massive number of shipments. Massive which would be very expensive but as importantly if there was a crash the whole of the globe would be contaminated and the estimate was 10 million rem would be released into the world from this and of course there would be international legal problems from that. Next we get to ice sheet disposal right in the Antarctic in Greenland you've heard about Greenland lately right. So that idea was that they would put the waste, the high-level waste into the through the ice into holes that were 50 to 100 meters deep and that the notion was that the the waste would heat up the ice melting it so that it would gradually sink to the bottom. That was the idea of it and that in fact the the it would take 10 years for them to sink and that there the problem though they raised was that the containers could be crushed and breached and then the sea would become radioact. Then it was sub sub seabed disposal which was in fact to go to the bottom of the sea and do a similar thing and they were going to invent a penetrator needle that would allow the with a pointed tip and fins for the guidance of the waste all the way down to the bottom of the sea. I kid you not these were the ideas that came up. Of course the risks were that ships might sink, cast might go overboard, the whole sea would be contaminated, make its way up the fuel chain to human consumption. Island disposal, another great idea. This was similar to the notion of the isolation in some ways not so dissimilar to deep isolation burial but it was in fact the issue that with global warming they couldn't say where the sea was going to rise and the fuel might be underwater. And then rock melt which was a variation of geological disposal in which the liquid waste would be put into an underground cavity. The heat output of the waste would gradually melt the rock and as the water evaporated it would mix with the molten rock and form a solid matrix and the rock melting would in fact consolidate and be underground. This would take a thousand years in and of itself and the fears were in fact that it would create a pathway for it to come to the surface. Then we get the disposal in deep holes, very deep holes in fact they call it BDH, very deep holes. BDH, very deep holes. This is really rocket science right? This is rocket science what they're doing. So the idea was to place a borehole in we'd go down at least 32,000 feet the rock formations of high strength and low permeability would isolate the waste but in fact their fear was that in taking the waste down that deep that they would create fissures and cracks that would make their way to the surface. And then we get so these were all basically next and we get to a mind geological repository and we get to the notion of became the preferred option including engineered barriers preventing leakage for long periods of time and I mean long periods of time total containment for a thousand years with isolation for 10,000 years and the waste would be impacted and the and it would in fact take millennia for it to eventually be saved. So when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act came into being in 82 it codified this environmental impact statement in terms of the disposing of the waste and deep geological burial that was the choice they made the DOE published a list of three sites Hanford Washington Yucca Mountain and a salt site in Death Smith County Texas opposition emerged immediately and all states filed lawsuits. Then in 86 the DOE published a list of sites in the east and midwest for investigation and the resistance began the same way. The eastern search was scrapped in 86 and the whole implementation of the process was in crisis after this since it was clear that no on no state no legislator was going to accept becoming the guardian of this problem. So it was amended in 1987 the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and site selection was completely abandoned. It was completely abandoned and reduced to one target. What was the target? Does anyone know what the target was? Yucca Mountain yes which in fact the National Academy of Sciences in 83 acknowledged could have orders of magnitude higher radiation doses than any reasonable health protection standard could set. So now we have the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and it's still in effect so because of this and all the problems then the NRC had to come up with what they wanted to call a continued storage room which is the waste could stay somewhere for a very long period until they figured out how to put it in a hall. That's what they came up with. So and there was wrangling over this and eventually they came up with a new term for it but basically they NRC made a commitment they would oversee this waste because eventually somewhere over some time near or far this waste would wind up in the brand and that's where we are basically today and then of course you have 9-11 which crystallized the problem even more bringing the impacts of malevolent acts into focus again not just the issues of proliferation and in fact the National Academy the National Governors Association said nuclear fuel pools were pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction after 9-11 and the NRC has done almost nothing in terms of protecting these sites which we have in Vermont we have in Massachusetts. So now to the issue now you add to arrogance naivety, denial and thoughtlessness you add profit. See until now this whole thing was going on without any profit mode first it didn't exist and then the notion was to come up with what was the best solution whether you would agree on that and now profit is what's driving what's going on. The nuclear industry is failing at this point it's unable to compete with solar, wind and natural gas reactors are closing and the colossal failure of nuclear power is and its waste problem is exposed this is untimely for the industry which trying to reinvent itself is the answer to climate change. Add to this that limited liability corporations like North Star here in Vermont and Holtec with little to no experience in cleanup are buying up shuttered reactors with the intention of making a profit on cleanup something that had not been conceived of when there was regulation we all paid into decommissioning funds. These utilities would go back to get rate increases to pay for decommissioning. At Yankee Road they went back repeatedly to cover this but now it's profit driven. So by cutting corners and compromising cleanup standards they think they can do it so did Antigee and other merchant operators believe they could make a killing on rendering aging nukes and see where we are today. Antigee lost million hundreds of millions of dollars and got out of the used nuke business as it were. So NRC has permitted serious underfunding of nuclear decommissioning fund. Examples are Yankee Road and Connecticut Yankee. Yankee Road's decommissioning was supposed to cost 365 million it cost over 700 million and you have to understand the reactor cost 39 million to build in 1960. Connecticut Yankee saw to over 1.2 billion but they had rate payer money to go back to. As I've said with utilities the decommissioning funds were subsidized by rate payers and Entergy and North Star do not have that luxury. So with this and they're believing they're going to make a killing they're first of all taking money out of the decommissioning fund for lawsuits, for lobbying, for hairdressers, toilet paper. Everything they're calling is decommissioning that's the first thing they do but they have a problem and the problem is the high level nuclear waste. Even if they cut corners it costs over 5 million a year to guard the high level waste on site and with no permanent solution waste could remain on site for decades if not centuries. These corporations have to create a temporary fix. The high level waste parking lots in West Texas and New Mexico to rid themselves of any responsibility for the waste and to survive. To survive they have to get the waste off site otherwise they'll end up like Entergy losing hundreds of millions of dollars just sitting there with the waste because these are temporary sites of course centralized interim storage and the other speakers will go into these issues the EPA standards aren't met they don't have to be met they're basically just a place to make the waste disappear and so who are the targets right? Who are the targets? The targets are working poor Hispanic communities in the Southwest. Communities targeted because like Nevada they have no political plow and are forced to choose between short-term economic gain and long-term health and safety. No community should be put in that position. No community should be forced to make that choice. So I want to return to my original question is clean air water land and a safe place to live a human right? Is it guaranteed? We can't clean our community up by foisting the problem on a temporary solution in another community. It must be done right and it must be done once. The waste shouldn't travel all the way out to the Southwest only to suddenly go oh ho hum now we've got a permanent place and we'll just move it all hundreds of thousands of shipments to someplace else the most dangerous shipments you can have on the road the nuclear industry and the federal government have failed miserably they have reneged on their commitments to reactor communities as well as states that there would be a solution to the waste by the time the reactor shutter. What is required is a scientifically sound and environmentally just solution for nuclear waste. We need to put our best minds to create the best solution we can given our limited capacity to understand the terrible situation we've created. There are no good solutions. There are only bad ones and terrible ones. We need to find the least bad. We need your help to do this. There is legislation that passed by the House the Congress to create interim storage your rep voted in favor of this legislation. We need you to let Welsh know that centralized interim storage is a bad idea. We need the best solution not one driven by corporate greed and mendacity. Again move it once do it right. So Diane Derigo who is the radioactive waste nuclear information and resource service in Washington DC is going to be talking to us about the vulnerabilities of centralized interim storage of high level nuclear waste and federal policy. So I'm Diane been with nuclear information and resource service since 1986. And before that I worked with the Sierra Club radioactive waste campaign out of Buffalo. So I've been fighting nuclear waste issues since about 1978 or nine when I was beginning to learn about them. And we had the reprocessing plant and the so-called low level radioactive waste ditches upstream of Buffalo New York and just upstream of the Seneca Nation, Cataraugus territory. The Cataraugus Creek which runs through the Cataraugus Indian Reservation was at one point during reprocessing the hottest radioactive water in the country. Because irradiated fuel or spent fuel or used fuel or whatever you want to call it. It is the hottest part of the nuclear power and weapons fuel chain. The irradiated fuel from nuclear power reactors is even hotter than the fuel from nuclear weapons. I saw a pie chart of all the radioactive waste in the country. Weapons and power waste high level low level transuranic and 92% of the radioactivity is in the irradiated fuel or high level waste or spent fuel from nuclear power. Even the weapons waste and the so-called low level waste which has plutonium in it and can kill you if you're exposed. Even that stuff is way less than 10% of the radioactivity. So what we're talking about here sticking to New Mexico and Texas is over 90% of the radioactivity. The uranium when it's in the ground it's better in the ground it's not as concentrated so there's a bunch of steps. The uranium is dug out of the ground or chemicals are injected into the ground to dissolve it contaminates the aquifer and then it's brought up. The uranium is then if it's mined it's then milled it's converted it's converted into a gaseous form and concentrated in uranium 235 and then that uranium all the rest of the uranium is depleted in the 235 is used to make fuel and that fuel is 10 foot long fuel rods you get a couple hundred of those in an assembly and a couple hundred assemblies go into the core of the reactor and at that point uranium's bad but it's not as penetrating as after it goes into the reactor and it gets banged with neutrons and split and all these other radioactive elements form and the binding energy heats the water turns the turbines and makes electricity then all these other things form when the uranium splits you get cesium and strontium strontium goes to the bone cesium goes to muscles and the heart is a muscle and so it goes to these elements go instead of calcium to people's bones if it gets in the water and the food so the bad stuff is formed in the reactor core even worse than the uranium and then in the fuel rods it's high level waste but if it leaks out of the rods it becomes quote low level waste or legal routine releases that went into the the streams downstream of the reactor so what we're talking about right now is this high level waste it's a radiated fuel when it comes out of the core of the reactor it's millions of times more radioactive than when it went in and each canister that would be on the roads or rails or waterways to ship it out to whoever gets stuck with it would have more long lasting radioactivity than the Hiroshima bomb it would have more plutonium than the Nagasaki bomb in each canister and we are talking about tens of thousands of canisters and shipments over our roads rails and waterways for 40 or 50 years routine shipments so it'd be great to get the waste out of Vermont and get it out of here but if this goes and legislation is passed to make this go what we're doing is triggering reactors from all around the country mostly in the east shipping for decades on a routinely on roads rail and if you're these canisters cannot be shielded they they contain a lot of radioactivity they give off radioactivity they're very heavy because there's an attempt to shield it but there's radioactivity that is emitted from these and can be detected within 50 feet it can be detected along the roads and rails so the the threat okay so the as Deb talked about there were efforts to try to find a permanent dump and that has not happened the one place that was targeted after screening the country and public opposition is Yucca mountain in Nevada western Shoshone territory complete direct violation of the ruby valley treaty of 1863 which gave the US government the right to pass through it did not give the government the right to do bomb testing which they did it did not give the US government the right to make a permanent deep geologic repository in this mountain this mountain is Yucca mountain is sacred to the western Shoshone's it is surrounded with a volcano cones it's in high seismic there's a hydro lap there's water around and they had to change the rules four times that I know of to not disqualify it from being the permanent dump for high level waste and finally in 210 or thereabouts 2010 the department of energy withdrew the application for that under Obama and secretary monies and they said we're not going to proceed with Yucca mountain it's not going to work well in the meantime people don't want to bother to look again they don't want to raise the public eye or the fear of a dump somewhere else so there's a big pressure to go after this one even though it's been 30 years and it cannot proceed so we're going to waste more time pretending that Yucca is going to work and it's not going to back up plan oh let's just temporarily store it somewhere in a centralized consolidated quote unquote interim storage site well this lie that the stuff would be moved to a temporary site has been tried before when I first started working on this stuff in the late 70s they called these sites away from reactor storage sites AFRs then in the mid 1980s when the nuclear waste policy act was being renewed from 82 and 87 they called it MRS monitored retrievable storage sites they gave money to a nuclear waste negotiator to entice native nations or local or state governments to volunteer and no one did there were people that dipped their toe in and then they said no way when they learned about it so we have stopped away from reactor storage in the 1970s and 80s we've stopped supposedly monitored retrievable storage which is supposedly interim storage in the 80s and 90s up till 1990 now we've got a proposal for consolidated interim storage CIS it's a new acronym and it is actually illegal under federal law to be pursuing an interim site at all back in the 80s when it was legal for the few years when they had the negotiator going out to find volunteers the site was only going to happen if and when there was an operating permanent repository so that it would guarantee that the site would not become a permanent de facto permanent dump but that's what's the danger is that we would have nuclear power waste moving on the roads and rails going to these centralized places and then never moving again and yet they're not designed to isolate it and Deb was talking about EPA environmental protection agency standards the permanent repository is required by law to project and uh not isolate but to allow a legal dose for a million years so they're supposed to try to watch and plan for the waste and not let it leak out for a million years and that has to be part of the plan well these sites that are targeted in Texas and New Mexico are going to get a 40-year license the waste is hazardous into the millions of years it is 91 or more percent of the radioactivity and the whole nuclear power and weapons fuel chain it's at reactor sites now and it definitely needs better safer storage we need to stop making more but we need to turn off the tap let's start moving it in the shell game on roads and rails and spreading the radioactivity through communities when there is no step forward on isolating it the goal needs to be to isolate it everything that we've created whether it's high level or so-called low level the goal has to be don't let it out and that's not what we've got the companies that Deb mentioned that are proposing the company is called Holtec and it's based in New Jersey but it's got a site in New Mexico near Carlsbad Caverns and they're proposing to bring in about a hundred and it could be up to 173,000 metric tons of high level radiated nuclear fuel right now the country has about 82,000 metric tons at the reactors around the country so they're proposing to be ready to take more maybe take it from other countries who knows and then the other site which is about 30 40 miles it's in Texas on the New Mexico border and it's waste control specialists it's partners with North Star which is just purchased Vermont Yankee and they are proposing 40,000 metric tons to come to their dump and the thing that these companies want Deb mentioned the profit motive the thing that they want is they want to get their fingers into the pots of money that have been saved up for managing the nuclear facilities after closure there's the decommissioning funds at reactors there's the nuclear waste fund that was collected when reactors are operating they pay into a national fund for permanent disposal and there's also damage funds that the courts have awarded to utilities to nuclear reactor operators who were promised by the government in contracts that the government would take the waste but the government hasn't taken it and so they went to court and now they're getting damages from the U.S. Treasury so that's called the damage fund so those are the three funds they want the money they're going to set up these short-term parking lot dumps they're going to put the whole country at risk moving it back and forth and there are shipment routes through Vermont even though you're way up here you wouldn't be like Illinois where you get all of it or or Nevada where you'd get all of it or you know but you're going to have in the hundred range of shipments that would come through here and you certainly have friends and family around the country that you don't want the whole country criss-crossed with irradiated nuclear fuel so it's winnable we stopped the AFRs we stopped the MRSs we'll stop the CISs and we've got legislation Deb mentioned that Peter Welch voted the wrong way on HR 3053 last year it's come back again it's HR 2699 and there's another one it's also hits the centralized storage dumps legalizes them HR 3136 and then there's a senate bill that's S1234 and then there's a discussion draft in the senate so those are the things we need to fight in Congress and we need our senators we need Leahy and Sanders and we need Welch in the house to vote against these things to not bring them to the floor if they're in committees where where they have control over it and they do need to hear from you because they've done the wrong thing in the past and Welch just last year and then the other thing is to tell them if you're in the mood to talk to them or send them a note don't appropriate money even though it's illegal it's not legal to have these things the Congress is still giving money to the Department of Energy to pursue them so no money for these nuclear facilities we're going to put money toward nuclear waste it should be to better isolate it and to replace it with other forms of energy thanks our next meeting is going to be probably be the last weekend October and we can take your name and email address and let you know but we can use all the help that we can get because at this time and you know we fought to shut down Vermont Yankee and once we got it closed everybody thought that the fight was over and we didn't have to do anything anymore but we have a lot of work still to do as you have just heard so our last speaker tonight is Leon Morgan who is Dina from from Albuquerque, New Mexico and she is she works with the nuclear issues study group and she is part of the community that has been impacted by remaining in mining and nuclear fuel cycles she's going to speak about her experience which we'll find out is not happy in terms of this issue thank you Deb for inviting me and thank you Deb for inviting me I must say good morning I want to thank Charles for the introduction and also the acknowledgement of the first nations that were living here my people are from the southwest and this is a picture of part of the southwest how many of you have seen this landscape okay so most of you so this was one of the famous landscapes of the John Wayne movie era and I think a lot of you might have known what happened to the cast and the people who worked in the movies I'm not sure if you all are familiar with the different cancers they got and those kinds of impacts because they were shooting movies right in uranium country um uranium is all over the world but it's mostly mined and extracted on indigenous lands internationally and so I like to show this photo because it's it's just really pretty but um in this area there are several abandoned uranium mines and there's a lot of contamination that's still being cleaned up that people don't really know about some of the local Navajo folks want to put up signs like for the tourists that come in to to show them that they are coming to contaminated areas because folks don't really know this but um I started the this says uranium mining I want to talk about the entire nuclear fuel chain so actually my talk is more about nuclear colonialism and so I'm going to go through several slides and I'm going to explain where I'm coming from and then come back circle back to what we're here to talk about tonight which is nuclear waste and so my people um this is this is just a culmination of some definitions that were created by different folks about what is nuclear colonialism and so basically um we we just had an interview today on the local public access um tv channel and one of the things I mentioned is that people think um colonialism and colonization are parts of the the u.s. history genocide and assimilation and all those things but they're they're still very present today such as um you mentioned relocation um when places are contaminated oftentimes folks have to move and the impact to indigenous peoples in the united states are still causing what some folks consider as a genocide so not just from uranium mining but also from weapons testing um and I'll come back to that too um so this is where my people are from this is the federal federally recognized government we call the navajo nation and so this is just to show you where where I'm at in the world I don't know how many of you are familiar with the four corners area so my family is more from northwestern new Mexico I grew up actually on the state line and so the history of uranium mining in the united states was really for weapons um development and so this is a map of all the abandoned uranium mines in the country from basically uh fueling uh world war two and so the darker blues are where most of the abandoned uranium mines are are um located and the thing about it is there's over 15 000 abandoned mines that the united united states EPA has identified but the u.s. department of energy only claims a little bit over 4 000 so it's kind of funny the discrepancy there and so abandoned uranium mines were abandoned because there were no laws in place at the time to clean them up so basically the EPA was formed in the 70s the national environmental policy act was signed in 1969 but a lot of the mining started in the 40s and the 50s so before there were regulations of place to demand cleanup um you know getting the water back to some kind of level we know that in these places it's literally it's it's pretty much impossible to get it back to pre-mining standards so if you notice the four corners area where my people are from there's a lot of abandoned uranium mines um the most are in Colorado and um there is some cleanup that's happening not there's no law to say that all of the abandoned mines in the United States will be cleaned up I don't know if Congress will ever pass a law to do that because of the cost um there was a campaign that folks were working on called clean up the mines a lot of people at the EPA a lot of our congressional folks were very supportive and interested in this but you know they still haven't passed this law so um our people um of the Navajo Nation have been successful um largely in part to advocacy community organizing and um basically educating our elected officials about the problem and so now we have what's called um these five-year cleanup plans so they're attempting to clean up all the mines on the Navajo Nation in these five-year periods which is a little bit of a joke because you know it was decades of of exploitation that occurred and and we're working in these little five-year increments um right now I believe we are in the third five-year period but it's it's really not it's really not enough so the first picture I showed is is a place that has had some cleanup and one of the biggest concerns for our people um is the health so when I was uh working on uranium mining issues I got started so where the reason I'm here today is because I had um some personal issues uh personal connections to health issues that my family was experiencing um my grandmother uh when I was in college my grandmother died from lung cancer and she was not a smoker and so um the whole family was like well how did she get cancer you know what what happened and um the thing about it is I didn't know anything about uranium mining or nuclear colonialism nuclearism um anything growing up and going to school in in in the in New Mexico I learned about uranium mining issues after I graduated from college so they don't teach about these things it's not required learning it's not it's just like the US history books they don't talk about the genocide they don't talk about all of the horrible things the United States did to my people um they still don't but they also don't talk about you know radiation and all of the things that are happening today um with nuclear colonialism and so when my grandmother died um was in like 2001 and then I got I guess I was enlightened in 2007 and as soon as I learned about radon gas and you know what happens if you inhale an alpha particle and then it disintegrates the half-life might occur in the lungs and then that gas that you inhaled is now solid and then it's continuously emitting radiation in your body I figured that's probably what happened to my grandma um so I've had a lot of relatives um die from cancers and different kinds of um health problems that are we believe are caused by uranium mine um there's really no way to prove it 100 after people die so that's good for the companies because they can say oh well you know they maybe they smoked or this and that so one of the biggest concerns of our people are that is the health of our people the health of our our environment the health of our water our sacred places our medicines um the animals and people talk about all of our relatives so the little creatures in the water the plants the the ones in that fly so basically the health of everything um so anyways that's how I got involved is because when my grandmother died and I learned in 2007 there was a proposal for a new uranium mine in my my family's community that's when I got involved and um luckily we stopped it in 2014 so it took seven years but we did it we were able to prevent the mine from opening um so that's kind of like where I came from is fighting the front end of the nuclear fuel chain but in New Mexico we have several stages of the nuclear fuel chain so this is an infographic of the uranium mining leading to the fuel for nuclear power plants the thing that's missing from this infographic is nuclear weapons so so I don't want I don't want to ignore our nuclear weapons they're very present especially in New Mexico but I just want to point out um we have almost every step so all of those little pictures we have almost all of that in New Mexico so there's just a list on the left side that shows all of the things that we're dealing with as a state so our people not just indigenous peoples all people in New Mexico we're dealing with tons of nuclear stuff the past mining the nuclear labs we have the only deep geological repository for the waste from weapons and then now we're dealing with the proposals for these two there's two proposals not just one so there's whole tech and then another company called WCS that are proposing to store the waste temporarily um in our area one is in New Mexico one's on the state line and the thing is they want to bring all of the waste from the power plants but there are no nuclear reactors in New Mexico so just to zoom in this is a picture of our state and you can see the different colors of the different industries that exist um in southeast New Mexico so the corner the southeast corner of the state is where these proposals are um this this this uh oops this the circle here okay that never happened right here is whole tech this is this is this is where they're proposing to build the the site that would store over 173,600 metric tons of the waste which is more than double which exists now Diane said there's 80,000 and then we have just um to the east is the other blue circle that's waste control specialists so that's on the Texas state line of New Mexico but we we still say this impacts our community so those two sites are about 40 miles apart and whole tech is only 13 miles north of the wind so so this is the region where they're targeting and if you look to the map on the left that whole area is the Permian Basin so there's it's one of the largest oil producing areas in the world and there's active fracking going on in the area um just east of the whole tech proposed the proposal site is Carlsbad there's a sinkhole right in the middle of town from all of the fracking there are oil leases on the whole tech site our land commissioner has written a letter about this because she's um working on this issue because this is probably not a good idea to build a the world's largest nuclear waste dump where there's active oil and gas drilling and fracking going on so this is New Mexico this is southeast New Mexico I live in Albuquerque which is in the middle of the state we have lots of other things in Albuquerque as well so just you know that's just to give you guys a background of where I'm coming from as an indigenous person as a New Mexican and and also as a community organizer and activist and so one thing I wanted to point out is that New Mexico is a very rural state we have only five congress people and so we we really need all the help we can get with folks like you who live near the places that produce the waste to work with your elected officials to keep the waste where it is for now until we figure something out because it doesn't make sense to move the waste across the country only temporarily New Mexicans believe that if it is moved there it's not going to be temporary it's going to become permanent because they're not going to move it again and so our organization we formed specifically to try to bring young people into the movement across the country I tell our organization we started three years ago we have oh no okay so I gotta click this thing so most of our folks are under 40 and we have a few folks over 40 but for the most part I tell my group we're the youngest anti-nuke group in the country and it's a lot of stress it's it's very scary for us that there's no ongoing or growing movement of of anti-nuke folks in this country I travel a lot I go to Europe I go to other places and I see a lot of young people very actively working so I just wanted to just put in some encouragement to you all to to try to reach out to young folks however you can go to schools or bringing it up in class or whatever you can do because we need the future generations to be aware of you know these issues and to work on them so right now I just wanted to wrap up by sorry my timer here I want to I want to continue showing you a couple of more slides and then just just finish with the with the last focus on CIS earlier Yucca Mountain was mentioned so this is just a again to give you a geographical reference horrible location you know technique the technical situation there is is not good it's not a good place to bury nuclear waste and it's also Diane mentioned the Western Shoshone so these are some of the other native folks fighting against Yucca Mountain and our friend Ian there he also refers to their people as the most bombed people the most bombed nation in the world there was over 900 nuclear tests that occurred in Nevada so again going back to nuclear colonialism and the genocide of indigenous peoples we see these sites so this is so that was Yucca Mountain these are the locations of the two facilities I zoomed in on New Mexico but you can see nationwide these are all the locations of the nuclear power plants and so basically anywhere between a nuclear power plant and the CIS proposed sites are in danger of exposure in accidents from from possible contamination from the the waste that could be moved so we definitely don't want it moved not just to keep it out of our backyard but to keep the entire country safe from any kind of risk so those are again the locations and for me as an indigenous person one of my greatest concerns earlier I showed you a map of the Navajo Nation this is the Navajo Nation again but our traditional homelands was not that you know the it's the orange shape there which is the Navajo Nation our traditional homelands was the entire area within those four sacred mountains so those sacred mountains are very important to our people and if you can see the green and yellow lines those are the railroads so those would be possible transport routes and the two mountains in New Mexico and Arizona are right along the railroad so for me one of the biggest impacts I could see for our culture would be the desecration and the damage to the integrity of these sacred places so we have the two sacred mountains Dokoslides and Flagstaff and then Totseth in New Mexico which um you know are also at risk so our people we have a law against the transport of radioactive waste so through the Navajo Nation proper the jurisdiction of the Navajo Nation is not respected by the federal government so it's not only an issue of health earlier I mentioned health contamination water sacred sites it's also a fight of sovereignty so our people we have a law that says you know you can't transport your waste through our land but that's not respected by the federal government so these are some of the things our people have done to try to protect our our communities but we're still dealing with a lot of institutionalized racism from the federal government um so just wrapping up some of our local communities have worked hard to pass opposition against these facilities so we have about close to 20 resolutions opposing the centralized interim storage including from the Navajo Nation and then we also had a very strong statement from our governor and a letter from our land commissioner to the nrc as well as a letter from our congressperson Deb Holland so New Mexico we do not want the waste and we're not saying it because we're just saying keep it out of our backyard but we already have tons of nuclear stuff we already have tons of radioactive waste we don't need more we don't want more and we're going to continue to fight to stop it so yeah that's where i'm from that's what's going on and that's why i'm here is to talk with you all to tell you we need your help we should work together you know it's it's just a really bad idea what they're trying to do so all the bills do you was talking about all of these things all of these ways to get involved are really important for not just you all here i mean i know the waste is dangerous and folks want it out of there but it's not okay to bring all of it to our communities in the southwest so i just wanted to say thank you there's my contact information if you have and the organization that i'm representing here is the nuclear issue study group is there a contact information and yeah that's it so thank you very much with that actually what i want to say is i really want to see all of you at our next meeting i think that you can't we can't ignore this and that we can't ignore the injustice and our privilege that we have of of you know sort of being able to sit back and let this happen we need to speak up to welch which we have as as a group the vermont yankee decommissioning alliance we we have sent welch letters and and we've been we've been confronting him but we need more people to do that we need you to join us i my guess is that you've been struck by something that someone had that dead or diane or leona or charles has said tonight and that maybe you have some questions if there are more of us i'd have you discuss first what maybe you're you were struck with and share that with each other but if we have about 15 more minutes so um does anybody have a question that they would like to have answered how many plans are there in america there's a little over a hundred there are that's a little over a hundred um there's maybe about 15 or 20 that have stopped operating there actually are two still being built in georgia they expect to actually start new ones uh people are fighting one in uh legiri in detroit um farmy three farmy one had a partial meltdown farmy two accidentally went critical before it was licensed to start and now they're trying to do a third one there um so around the world there's over 400 we have about a quarter of them in the united states now russia started with the first nuclear explosion what are what did they do to get rid of all of their you're talking about chernobyl yeah the well that wasn't the first i mean there but to answer that we knew to answer that it's still a mess they had to put a second stone over it and it's a continuing problem and actually holtec the company that wants to make a dump by leona is um building containers there too everyone cares about the tension even if they lie while they're getting a lot of attention but the issues of waste are like bastard children right nobody wants to know them or do anything about them so we're coming here tonight talking about the bastard children that nobody wants to deal with so i really would like us to try to focus on that in a way because you have a bastard child in your state and your legislators want to ship it off to some orphanage in her state to just sort of hang out there without any hope of going to college or doing anything else just sort of getting completely screwed and i would just like us to stay focused on that because that's really what we're talking about these are the bastard children this waste is something that nobody wants to go and look it's really hard i mean after this talk i want to go drink you know i have to work with them to be positive it's not easy the stories they tell are really painful and excruciating and it makes us all feel what can we do but look there's a lot we can do we shut for my yankee i worked to shut kinetica yankee yankee row millstone unit one and that was sexy shunning newt's is sexy waste is the bastard child but this is where all the damage really is this is the damage and this is what we have to be responsible for and this is what we have to make our legislators for this is what we have to make the scientific community responsible for they made a mess and now they have to find a way to deal with it and to clean it up but they won't do that unless we make it clear that that's their job so i just want us to stay focused on that because there are a lot of sexy issues and we're not one of them well those sexy radio nuclides from the reactors are all in the waste and so all the radio activity is in the waste and all the horror of Chernobyl is potential in all of these fuel assemblies so it's connected doesn't isn't the um the stupid truck our wall is that not what are you doing with uh the fight for that we don't want the wall but on the other hand we don't want you to get all this junk right so let's stick to the i think the wall is another subject right what does a solution to any of this waste problem look like and that's the hard answer this creates fear in everybody and in the scientific community i mean what Carter's environmental impact study did was said that deep geological burial was the best of the worst and that they had to use standards to determine what could be the best sites across the country and instead they chose a political solution which was to stick it to the most vulnerable state that had the least power because every other state was up in arms about it and so as cowards the cowards they were they just chose to go through a process and spend billions of dollars doing nothing but the reality is and this is this is why there's no good solution there's only bad and worse there is going to have to be work done scientific work and god knows i don't want to put myself in the hands of scientists again i mean screw me to begin with i live four miles from a reactor on one side and 16 from the other and yet they're the ones who have to work on standards that have to be the basis for any solution so first there has to be actually scientists set up to work on this the best minds that set standards and from standards then they look at what sites might meet those standards and then from potentially finding slight sites going and providing a consent based siting process which is incredibly complicated because you have to decide well who gets to make decisions is it the little town is it the county is it the state is it the people along the transport chamber of commerce the chamber of commerce i mean you open they literally created a pandora's box conflict and yet that's what has to be dealt with and in a certain way what has to be decided is that america as bad as it is can also do things at moments that are really good and that what they have to work to do for the first time is do something that's really good and take this on and work it out and develop a consent-based siting process that's based on standards but it's also based on communities being willing to opt out if they don't want it states being willing to opt out county's being able this will take a long time then so you have standards you have sites and then you have communities that are all part of this and so this is a very long process but it's the process that should have happened that they never did and in the meantime for reactive communities what they have to do is in fact harden the waste onsite which means really beef up not just security but the canisters themselves protect them from terrorism and do a much better job than they're doing which of course will cost money but this should not be a profit-driven issue this is a health and safety issue this is a health and safety issue for america and for the world because the crisis is not just in this country it's throughout the world at this point those 400 reactors they're all in the same place and none of them have a solution to this problem and part of why we're coming around is because not just because leona has the potential to be screwed some more but because the reality is that they're trying to shock themselves is the answer to global warming right now they're trying to do it all again they're trying to do another shuck and jive and dance around and talk about how clean they are and meanwhile they have been so irresponsible so arrogant so stupid and second rate that they have to be held accountable and that's our job that's our job to hold them accountable that's the work that's important and i just i just want to add again that it's our responsibility to have our to to teach our neighbors about keeping the importance of keeping the waste here in vermont until a site or some sort of site is found that that is scientifically sound because it's dangerous to move it so between the end of dance answer and what you just said right there you've basically answered my question but i just wanted to paraphrase for clarification for the people that are in the room to keep it local and to keep it not so abstract for the people that are here what we need to do at this point if we want to take some control of this is to work towards hardened onsite storage for the interim which is the bad solution but it's better than the worst solutions yeah to work on hardened onsite storage and to slow down the train of making a new nuclear and continuing old nuclear reactors as the answer to global warming yes that's the two wrong solution yes that the people in this room can take yes they need to take and need to take their friends and their neighbors they need to take to their legislators to welsh to get him to get all this notion to lady who is supporting yucca mountain endlessly to sanders who in fact put the legislation in to start targeting his spanish communities in in southern texas this is your great senator sanders he's the one who helped create waste control specialists and the dump out there so this is really important for all of us and it's really hard and and it's not sexy but what john is saying is this is in fact this two prong process and it's a process that we began actually when we had a high level waste summit in connecticut 15 years ago 20 years ago on hardening the waste onsite because of 9 11 and all that the notion of hard nine so it storage was has become a kind of political solution not a real one in any way and why because it'll cost money and the industry doesn't want to spend it the other reason they don't want to do it is because they don't want to acknowledge how dangerous the waste is so there has to be this process to understand that to keep the waste on site to force them to be accountable also has the potential to save the environment and save us from another generation of this contamination of our land so take one more question and then we're gonna well i just want to say that i've been working on the f-35 issue in burlington i've been when new ski um and frankly i think i'm sick of contacting my legislators if we really want to make a change in vermont we need new senators and a new rep and we need as a group to find the people who will stand for the issues that we care about because sanders hasn't met with us lay he hasn't met with us and none of them they're all selling us out they sound like they're going to stand on our side but the truth is absolutely none of them do so if we want to see change we need to find the people who believe what we believe and good for you for saying it because you know it seems like bernie sanders is a brand like ben and jerry he said not everybody thinks he's all that on every issue or even any of them so there's lots of work that needs to be done in lots of different prongs right so there's people who need to do work on the electoral part of this and then there's people who need to focus on the reality of what is happening with nuclear power plants and high level nuclear waste and so hopefully we just got about 10 or more people who haven't been doing this work for for a while and getting you involved and talk to your neighbors talk to your kids talk to your grandkids but it's really the we can't give up this fight yet so i want to thank you all and yes so this tour is being underwritten by citizens awareness network and some of our friends and we have to drive that cast all around new england which takes gasoline and we own us here as a volunteer flew across the country and these here flew across well not across the country so anything you can put in that box we would greatly appreciate if you're watching on tv you can go to new cluster.org and make a donation anytime of the day or night thank you i'll just say one more thing that so tonight this was the first um first stop on the tour tomorrow they will be at bale in um in in south royalton um so if you know anyone down in that area and then on to white river rattle row greenfield massachusetts what part of new hampshire they're going to we're actually going to amesbury which is on the massachusetts side but basically the seabird react right so um so if you know folks in any of those areas um please tell them as well to to um look for this for the so thanks again thank you all for coming thanks