Chief Akagi requests public hearing to review any new governance arrangement for the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor on Peskotomuhkati homeland

Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Article 29 of UNDRIP requires states to take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials takes place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. The CNSC’s decision to grant NB Power a 10-year license renewal does not reflect this commitment.

by Abby Bartlett, June 10, 2024 homeland https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/06/10/chief-akagi-requests-public-hearing-to-review-any-new-governance-arrangement-for-the-point-lepreau-nuclear-reactor-on-peskotomuhkati-homeland/

On May 15, New Brunswick’s Energy Development Minister Mike Holland tabled the first reading of a bill to change the Electricity Act. The change would allow NB Power to enter a partnership with Ontario Power Generation (OPG).

In a letter to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) on May 29, Peskotomuhkati Chief Hugh Akagi outlined his initial concerns with the proposed agreement between NB Power and OPG, which reportedly includes a partial ownership stake in the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station.

The letter is from the Passamoquoddy Recognition Group (PRGI) which represents the Peskotomuhkati Nation in Canada and the interests of rightsholders and the Peskotomuhkati ecosystem, including the Point Lepreau Nuclear Station and areas surrounding up to 90 km away.

Any new owners of the Lepreau CANDU nuclear reactor will have rights and responsibilities that PRGI wants clarified. In May 2022, Chief Akagi spoke at a public hearing held by the CNSC in Saint John to discuss NB Power’s request for a 25-year renewal of the license to operate the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor.

At the hearing, PRGI asked the CNSC to reduce the license to three years, stating that the average length of licensing is only 2.44 years. In the end, the CNSC granted a 10-year licence. Given that PRGI has already felt the impact of the proposed change in licence holders, they are rightfully concerned about the possible repercussions that will come from the new proposed changes.

In December 2023, New Brunswick published its new energy strategy, outlining plans to declare that the Point Lepreau reactor will undergo licence “renewals every 10 years.” This statement assumes that the 10-year license length will be the conclusion of future discussions that have not happened yet.

Back in June 2022, Chief Akagi stated that a 10-year license renewal meant that Canada was not meeting its own legal and related obligations to the Nation. “The new licence gives NB Power the ability to create and store 10 more years of fresh and dangerous high-level waste on our territory. This is not acceptable,” Chief Akagi said at the time.

Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Article 29 of UNDRIP requires states to take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials takes place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. The CNSC’s decision to grant NB Power a 10-year license renewal does not reflect this commitment.

Regarding any new governance arrangement for the Point Lepreau reactor, PRGI has many questions outlined in its letter to the CNSC.

PRGI wonders how a new joint ownership entity will fulfill its Indigenous consultation obligations. Will PRGI have any say about these arrangements? How will a joint ownership arrangement for the existing CANDU reactor impact any new reactors on the Point Lepreau site? What will OPG’s responsibilities be for the existing and any further nuclear waste produced by the Point Lepreau plant under a co-ownership arrangement?

NB Power is fraught with 3.6 billion dollars of nuclear debt due to the original building cost of the Lepreau nuclear generating station, the later refurbishment of the reactor, and the poor performance over the course of its operation.

This potential agreement would mean shedding the Lepreau nuclear reactor off to a new entity, which would be co-owned with OPG and NB Power in an agreement that could force New Brunswick customers to pay for expensive nuclear power for decades.

The letter by Chief Akagi ends with two requests. First is the need for the CNSC to commit to holding in-person hearings for the future request to change ownership of the Lepreau nuclear reactor to ensure that the Peskotomuhkati Nation can intervene in its traditional way rather than only through written intervention.

The second request asks the CNSC to remind the New Brunswick Government that a future 10-year license for the Lepreau reactor is not up to the provincial government. Instead, it will be a matter of review and decision made by the CNSC, which will involve public intervenors, including PRGI.

As Chief Akagi outlines, NB Power is required to make an application to the CNSC to authorize the transfer of licence, and under section 40 of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, they are also required to hold a hearing. The Peskotomuhkati Nation does not want this proposed change to become another injustice that they must bear. The CNSC needs to ensure that Peskotomuhkati people’s voices are heard, understood, and respected in the process.

Abby Bartlett is a research assistant on the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University.

June 11, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Dismantling the atomic lie

By Linda Pentz Gunter, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/06/09/dismantling-the-atomic-lie/

My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.

If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.

When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.

When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.

We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.

Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.

And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.

We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.

It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.

When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.

So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.

In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.

In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.

Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.

When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.

This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.

Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:

“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”

Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.

In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.

In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.

In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.

The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.

Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.

Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?

Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.

At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.

The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.

But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.

These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:

“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”

Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.

Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.

The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.

France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.

Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.

The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?

And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.

Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.

“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:

Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.

And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.

In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.

And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.

The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits the organization’s news site, Beyond Nuclear International. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.

June 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference | Leave a comment

Moving nuclear waste through traditional territories could face opposition, Ontario First Nation says

‘Think about how many treaty territories that waste would have to go through,’ chief says

Colin Butler · CBC News · May 27, 2024

A First Nation in southwestern Ontario says even if the community votes yes on a proposed $26 billion dump for nuclear waste within their traditional territory, it would likely be opposed by other First Nations, through whose territories the more than 5.5 million spent fuel rods would have to pass.

Canada’s nuclear industry has been on a decades-long quest to find a permanent home for tens of thousands of tonnes of highly radioactive waste. The search has narrowed to two Ontario communities — Ignace, northwest of Thunder Bay, and the Municipality of South Bruce, north of London.

Both will vote later this year on whether to build a deep geologic repository, a kind of nuclear crypt, where more than 50,000 tonnes of waste in copper casks will be lowered more than 500 metres underground to be kept for all time, behind layers of clay, concrete and the ancient bedrock itself.

But so will their Indigenous neighbours, whose traditional territories the towns are within, which gives each respective First Nation a veto.

In the case of Saugeen Ojibway Nation in particular, it means the community again finds itself as the future arbiter of a potential nuclear waste site on their traditional lands for the second time in a few years.

In early 2020, its members voted overwhelmingly against the construction of a deep geologic repository outside of Kincardine, that was proposed by Ontario Power Generation.

This time around, Chief Greg Nadjiwon of the neighbouring Chippewas of the Nawash, says the proposal by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a non-profit industry group, for a similar facility has a better chance, but is still a tough sell…………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/nuclear-waste-ontario-south-bruce-saugeen-nation-1.7213878

May 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Indigenous opposition to nuclear waste being transported through their territory

Concerns growing surrounding nuclear waste management

Anishinabek, The voice of the Anishinabek nation. May 22, 2024, By Rick Garrick

FORT WILLIAM — Fort William’s Elysia Lone Elk is raising concerns about the transportation of nuclear materials through Northern Ontario if the proposed nuclear waste site near Ignace in Treaty #3 territory gets the go-ahead.

The Trans-Canada Hwy. was closed for about 20 hours in 2001 after a head-on collision between two transport trucks, one of which was transporting two canisters of radioactive material — iridium — about 25 kilometres east of Dryden, 105 kilometres west of Ignace. The collision resulted in “widespread destruction” and the deaths of four people, two from each vehicle, according to a news report. Officials from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission eventually arrived on site, found there was no leakage, and removed the canisters to a safe location.

“Water is life, it’s our most sacred resource,” Lone Elk says. “We need that to survive, animals need that to survive, and I don’t think we should be drilling underground and playing with aquifers with a very toxic harmful material that has a half-life beyond my conception of time.”

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has been following a process to select a site for Canada’s plan to safely manage used nuclear fuel long-term since 2010, and has since narrowed down the potential sites to two areas for Canada’s deep geological repository, the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace area in northwestern Ontario, and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation-South Bruce area in southwestern Ontario. If the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation-Ignace area is selected as the site, nuclear materials would have to be transported across Northern Ontario to the site.

“If it’s so safe, then why are you even transporting it, just bury it where it is? We know how dangerous those highways can be,” Lone Elk says. “The fact that no one on the [potential transportation] corridor gets a say is a democratic problem, very frustrating.”

Lone Elk adds that the nuclear material would be transported across Northern Ontario for the operating life of the proposed deep geological repository. The NWMO states on their website that based on current projections of Canada’s inventory of used nuclear fuel, transportation is anticipated to take about 40 years to complete. The NWMO adds that they are exploring road and/or rail options for transporting used nuclear fuel to the deep geological repository.

“The (Fort William) Band Council has passed two resolutions, one focusing on the proximity principle and then the other one specifically outright stating we do not support nuclear fuel being transported through our traditional territory,” Lone Elk says. “We’re trusting their scientists, we’re trusting industry scientists, we’re trusting industry factors; so when does the First Nation get to participate with Indigenous knowledge?”

Fort William Chief Michele Solomon says Fort William passed two resolutions in the last four years opposing nuclear waste being brought into Fort William territory.

“I think that it’s fair to say we stand with other First Nations in Robinson Superior Treaty territory to say that there’s nothing that gives us comfort that there would be any safety with this being transported through our communities,” Solomon says. “We see the increase in accidents on the highways going through our homelands so we’re strongly opposed to it.”

Solomon adds that their community has not been consulted on this issue.

Based on how the community has responded to other possible threats to our homelands, the people have been strongly opposed to other things that have been proposed for our territory,” Solomon says. “If the government wants to proceed with this, then they need to consult with the rights holders of this territory. So if it needs to pass through Robinson Superior territory, you need to consult with all of those communities.”

Solomon says it is not enough for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to say that it is safe.

“I think there should be independent research done and that has not happened as far as I know,” Solomon says, noting that unhealthy things have been brought into her community’s airspace and waterways before. “So we are strongly opposed.”

The Assembly of First Nations is holding four Regional Dialogue Sessions: A Dialogue on the Transportation and Storage of Used Nuclear Fuel at locations across the country, including on May 22 at the Delta Hotels by Marriott in Thunder Bay.

--

May 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, indigenous issues, wastes | Leave a comment

Russian uranium ban reopens threat of uranium mining escalation in US

Executives from Uranium Energy, Terrapower, Centrus and Energy Fuels couldn’t contain their excitement. Nor can they wait to begin mining, milling, and enriching uranium again in the US, to the detriment most especially of Native American tribes living on the land already permanently scarred and poisoned by previous such operations and who are still waiting for adequate or any cleanup and reparations.

The Navajo Nation, who have banned uranium mining on their territory, was home to more than 500 uranium mines at peak operations, all of which are now abandoned but not cleaned up. (There are more than 4,000 abandoned uranium mine sites across the US.) Tribal members understand all too well what uranium mining can do to the health and wellbeing of a community.

Beyond Nuclear, By Linda Pentz Gunter, 24 May 24

When Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, no one knew how long the fighting would continue and what the outcome might be. Kyiv was expected to fall immediately. It didn’t. More than two years on, the war continues and the rumblings from Russia about nuclear weapons use grow frighteningly louder.

The rush by the United States and its NATO allies at the time of the invasion to help defend — and to some extent arm — Ukraine included a quick decision to sanction Russian fossil fuel imports. On March 8, 2022, just 12 days after the invasion, US president, Joe Biden, signed an Executive Order banning the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States. Russian uranium was not included.

At the time of the 2022 ban on Russian fossil fuels, many of us in the anti-nuclear movement were agitating for a Russian uranium ban as well. At least 12% of US uranium imports comes from Russia to fuel domestic US reactors. That number rises to close to 50% if you also factor in uranium sourced from Russian satellites Kazakhstan (25%) and Uzbekistan (11%). (Canada is the other major single-source supplier of uranium to the US at 27%.)

On May 13, 2024, President Biden finally signed into law a bipartisan bill — the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act — banning imports of Russian low-enriched uranium. According to the bill, the ban affects: “Unirradiated low-enriched uranium that is produced in the Russian Federation or by a Russian entity” (read Rosatom operating outside Russia).

When we were pushing for a Russian uranium boycott at the start of the war, it was in the context of highlighting the detriment of nuclear power and fed into our agenda to permanently end the use of this dangerous and discriminatory technology. We asked then why the nuclear sector was getting a pass. Now we have the answer. The bill is a poisoned pill, almost literally.

The bill’s enactment “releases $2.72 billion in appropriated funds to the Department of Energy to invest in domestic uranium enrichment further advancing a secure and resilient global nuclear energy fuel supply consistent with our international obligations,” said the US State Department.

This is all part of the absurd agenda to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 (too late) and, said the State Department, “to establish a secure nuclear fuel supply chain, independent of adversarial influence, for decades to come.” It will do nothing of the kind.

While the new law may claim to end US dependency on Russian uranium, it does not end American addiction to a fatal energy source that victimizes the communities least resourced to fight back. Furthermore, it will make America’s path to a renewable energy economy all the harder, redirecting funds and precious time toward the most expensive and slowest way to address the climate crisis (nuclear) instead of faster, cheaper renewables.

There are no prizes for guessing who was cheering the loudest as Biden wielded his pen last week.

Executives from Uranium Energy, Terrapower, Centrus and Energy Fuels couldn’t contain their excitement. Nor can they wait to begin mining, milling, and enriching uranium again in the US, to the detriment most especially of Native American tribes living on the land already permanently scarred and poisoned by previous such operations and who are still waiting for adequate or any cleanup and reparations.

One of those places, the Grand Canyon, is already under threat from the Pinyon Plain uranium mine, a project of Canadian-owned Energy Fuels and which started operations in January 2024, against the strong opposition of the Havasupai tribe who live there.

“We have been against uranium mining for decades because of the known risks to land and air, water and people,” said Carletta Tilousi, a leader of the Havasupai tribe who is fighting to cancel the uranium operations at Pinyon Plain, which is located near Red Butte, a sacred site to the Havsupai people.

“Uranium mining in the southwest has scarred and left a horrifying legacy of death in our communities. Thousands of abandoned uranium mines on federal and tribal lands have not been cleaned up,” she said.

“Uranium will continue to poison the Grand Canyon including the aquifers that feed into the Colorado River,” added Tilousi. “Contaminants from the uranium mine are likely to make their way to the deep aquifers that feed Havasu Springs. The mine closure is the only way to avoid this risk.”

The Navajo Nation, who have banned uranium mining on their territory, was home to more than 500 uranium mines at peak operations, all of which are now abandoned but not cleaned up. (There are more than 4,000 abandoned uranium mine sites across the US.) Tribal members understand all too well what uranium mining can do to the health and wellbeing of a community.

“This decision by Biden is terrible news,” said former uranium mine worker, Larry King of the Navajo Nation, a member of Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining that has advocated mine cleanup for decades. Added King: “They’ve never returned an aquifer to pre-mining stages,” after extracting uranium through in-situ leach mining, the predominant technique currently used. “The companies got what they want out of Navajo and moved on.”

Despite the ban, the Navajo Nation had already been under a renewed threat of resumed uranium mining when Uranium Resources tried to open a new in situ leach mine at Church Rock, a plan that was defeated by tribal opposition. But Toronto-based Laramide Resources has since bought out Uranium Resources and wants to mine uranium there because the land is surrounded by — but not within — the boundaries of the Navajo reservation.

King’s home lies within view of Laramide’s plans. “The environmental impact statement says there are certain dwellings within the diameter of the project and those people will have to move,” King said. “I’m not moving. This is where I’m from. I’m not moving a foot.”

After Biden signed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, the Washington Post ran a disgracefully slanted article, in which not a single Native American voice was heard. Reporter Maxine Joselow quoted executives from four nuclear corporations and two politicians, all of whom favored the legislation. She made only a glancing reference to mine opponents as “others” and “still others” after prefacing their anonymous mention with “Though some environmentalists support nuclear power…”

But she was more than happy to repeat the utter nonsense spewed by Energy Fuels senior vice president, Curtis Moore, who said the company’s Grand Canyon mine would have “zero” risk to water supplies there and that “Uranium is absolutely essential to the fight against climate change.”

Americans, and especially Native Americans, will pay the price for this bill which, instead of banning uranium imports and transitioning away from nuclear power, seeks instead to stimulate exponential domestic growth of this dirty industry………………………………………………….. more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/05/19/terrible-news/

May 25, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues, Uranium | Leave a comment

Indigenous Senator warns new laws will turn Australia into “the world’s nuclear waste dump”

Giovanni Torre – May 13, 2024, https://nit.com.au/13-05-2024/11377/lidia-thorpe-warns-new-laws-will-turn-australia-into-the-worlds-nuclear-waste-dump?mc_cid=a41a81cd8c&mc_eid=261607298d

Senator Lidia Thorpe has warned new legislation to regulate nuclear safety of activities relating to AUKUS submarines has left Australia open to becoming “the world’s nuclear waste dump”.

Under the AUKUS deal, the federal government agreed to manage nuclear waste from Australian submarines, but under legislation to be introduced in June, Australia could be set to take nuclear waste from UK and US submarines also, Senator Thorpe warned.

The Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung independent senator for Victoria called on the government to urgently amend the bill to prohibit high-level nuclear waste from being stored in Australia, a call she said is backed by experts in the field and addresses one of the major concerns raised during the inquiry into the bill.

“This legislation should be setting off alarm bells, it could mean that Australia becomes the world’s nuclear waste dump,” Senator Thorpe said on Monday.

“The government claims it has no intention to take AUKUS nuclear waste beyond that of Australian submarines, so they should have no reason not to close this loophole.

“Unless they amend this bill, how can we know they’re being honest? They also need to stop future governments from deciding otherwise. We can’t risk our future generations with this.”

In March, Senator Thorpe questioned Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong about the long-term cost from storage of nuclear waste, and whether Australia would take on foreign nuclear waste under the AUKUS deal. The minister responded that this cost is not included in the current $368 billion estimated for AUKUS, and she could not confirm that foreign waste would not be stored in Australia.

Senator Thorpe noted that the US Environmental Protection Agency warns high-level nuclear waste remains dangerous for at least 10,000 years; managing the risk posed by the decommissioned fuel rods from the AUKUS submarines would require storage and management that is future-proof, something that has proven challenging even in countries with advanced nuclear industries.

She also pointed out on Monday that the bill has also been criticised for lack of transparency and accountability; and allows the Minister of Defense to bypass public consultation and override federal and state laws to determine sites for the construction and operation of nuclear submarines, and the disposal of submarine nuclear waste.

Senator Thorpe said there are serious concerns about a lack of community consultation and the risk of violating First Peoples right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

Historically, governments have tried to push the storage of radioactive waste on remote First Nations communities, with successful campaigns in Coober Pedy, Woomera, Muckaty, Yappala in the Flinders Ranges and Kimba fighting off these attempts.

“We’ve seen how far the major parties will go to ingratiate themselves with the US. Labor must amend this bill to prove they’re putting the interests of our country first,” Senator Thorpe said.

“And they need to change the powers that allow the Minister and the Department to choose any place they like for nuclear waste facilities with no oversight or community consultation.

“That’s complete overreach and will undermine First Peoples rights for Free, Prior and Informed Consent under the United Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The senator said “time and again” governments have attempted to turn remote communities into nuclear waste dumps, with the risks from nuclear waste always being put on First Peoples.

“I’m concerned that this time it will be no different,” she said.

“The Bill allows the government to contract out liability for nuclear safety compliance, includes no emergency preparedness or response mechanisms, no consideration of nuclear safety guidelines from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency and leaves many other questions on nuclear safety unanswered.”

“This Bill fails to set out a nuclear safety framework for the AUKUS submarines and instead focuses on defence objectives, while sidestepping safety, transparency and accountability. It’s a negligent and reckless bill that should not pass the Senate.”

May 24, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, indigenous issues, wastes | Leave a comment

Russian uranium ban reopens threat of uranium mining escalation in US

Executives from Uranium Energy, Terrapower, Centrus and Energy Fuels couldn’t contain their excitement. Nor can they wait to begin mining, milling, and enriching uranium again in the US, to the detriment most especially of Native American tribes living on the land already permanently scarred and poisoned by previous such operations and who are still waiting for adequate or any cleanup and reparations.

Beyond Nuclear, By Linda Pentz Gunter, 19 May 24