Confirmed: Environmental Racism - Nuke Shipments Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Boyle, Francis Thursday, April 13, 2000 10:21 AM "DOE could have completely avoided the Chicago Metropolitan Area if they had wanted to by shipping it up I57, to I80, to I94, then up to Michigan. Instead, they maliciously and deliberately shipped weapons grade plutonium on I55 into Chicago, then routed it around the Chicago interstates out into Michigan. Of course these interstates went through Chicago neighborhoods where people of color and the poor live. So much for Clinton's Executive Order and 'Environmental Equity.'" Before i went up to Kalamazoo I had discussed some of the issues involved with my friend and colleague, Fred Harris, who teaches environmental law here. When I got back, I sent Fred a copy of this post, and we talked about it a bit. Fred then discussed this in one of his classes as an example environmental racism, and criticized Richardson for routing weapons grade plutonium through Latino and Black neighborhoods in Chicago. Immediately after class, a well intentioned white student from a central Illinois farming town south of here on I57(where i have visited) whose inhabitants are predominantly white came up to Fred and said basically the following: "You are right. DOE was going to ship this stuff right near our town. but when we found out about it, our city politicians went over to Springfield (The State Capitol) and enlisted the support of State Legislators over there. They in turn pressured DOE in Washington to re-route and divert the shipment away from our town." Notice of course that due to the pressure exerted by sparsely populated white farming communities and their politicians, DOE diverted a shipment of 5 ounces of weapons grade plutonium directly into the southside of the Chicago Metro Area (including Gary and Hammond Indiana ) where there might be a million Latinos and Blacks living. In federal district court in Kalamazoo last Friday, we produced a scientist who testified that in the event of an accident 5 ounces of weapons grade plutonium could kill one million people. The DOE and USG never disputed that estimate, just opined that such an accident would never happen. We responded with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc. In any event, notice the profound environmental racism here. Richardson and his DOE deliberately and needlessly exposed about a million People of Color in the Chicago Metro Area to a catastrophe, rather than expose low density white farmers in Central Illinois to the same risk. There are also some interesting pedagogical issues here. I discussed this case in my human rights course and pointed out that environmental racism is also an issue of human rights law. I asked the students if they knew anything about environmental racism. Those who had studied environmental law with Fred Harris knew about Environmental Racism. Those who had studied environmental law with our white professor knew nothing about it. according to Fred, generally speaking the upper middle class white professors who usually teach environmental law do not believe in environmental racism. so i proceeded to give my human rights class a lecture on environmental racism and what it has done to Blacks, Latinos and worst of all, Native Americans, whose reservations have become dumping grounds for large-amounts of radioactive wastes from all over the country. Part of the problem here is that the environmental lawyers travel in their own circles; the human rights lawyers travel in their own circles; and there are any a handful of lawyers with the guts to take on anti-nuclear weapons cases.This case is interesting because the coalition of Plaintiffs includes human rights organizations, environmental organizations, anti-nuclear weapons organizations, and Native American nations in Canada upon whose lands these dangerous activities will take place.I concluded the lecture by pointing out that the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination could be useful in representing People of Color who have been the victim of environmental racism. As for Richardson, this Latino Nuclear Emperor wears no clothes. fab. Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue Champaign, Ill. 61820 217-333-7954 (voice) 217-244-1478 (fax) fboyle @law.uiuc.edu Nuclear Information & Resource Service 1424 16th St. NW Suite 404 Washington, DC 20036 Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League P.O. Box 88 Glendale Springs, NC 28629 Physicians for Social Responsibility Atlanta Chapter 421 Clifton Road Atlanta, GA 30307 March 22, 2000 For Immediate Release Contact: Mary Olson, NIRS Southeast 706-722-8968 Janet Zeller, BREDL 336-982-2691 Kevin Kamps, NIRS National Office 202-328-0002 Ed Arnold, PSR/Atlanta 404-378-9078 Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nuclear Information and Resource Service Join Legal Challenge to U.S. Nuclear Proliferation-Prone Plutonium Plan Citing grave concerns about the potential spread of plutonium for bombmaking throughout the world, three organizations, two national and one regional have joined the plaintiffs who have sued to stop a U.S.-Russian-Canadian plan to use nuclear weapons plutonium as fuel in nuclear power reactors. The internationally-known Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), with nearly 6000 members, including more than 1000 U.S. grassroots groups nationwide, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Inc. (BREDL), headquartered in North Carolina with 30 chapters in five southern states, and the internationally known Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), the U.S. affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for educating about the dangers of nuclear weapons, are the latest public interest advocates to formally enter a federal lawsuit in Kalamazoo, Michigan which was brought by an array of Canadian and U.S. First Nations tribes and other nuclear power and weapons critics. The lawsuit seeks to halt a test shipment of mixed oxide plutonium fuel, or MOX, from being transported to a test nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario from the Russian Federation, as part of a bigger scheme to use MOX as reactor fuel in light water reactors in the Southeastern United States, Canada and Russia. Billed as a peaceful means of reusing nuclear weapons, the plan would legitimize the commercialization and exportation of plutonium and may allow many nations and even independent groups to develop nuclear bomb capability. The Chalk River test, named "Parallex," was first challenged in court last December when plaintiffs sued the U.S. Department of Energy to halt shipment of the U.S. MOX fuel from being trucked across Michigan to Canada until there was a formal, public decision making process over the environmental and nuclear weapons proliferation impacts of the program. Judge Richard Alan Enslen ruled that while the Energy Department had acted in bad faith to hasten the test of MOX, courts could not stop the Executive Branch from conducting foreign policy. The plaintiffs are asking the judge to reconsider that decision, and NIRS, PSR and BREDL are adding their weight to that request. "The Department of Energy has already begun to disregard the law and trample our rights," said Janet Zeller, BREDL's Executive Director. "People from across the country must join together to block this reckless and secretive program and insure that the DOE obeys national and international law." BREDL is campaigning against the planned use of MOX fuel in six Southeastern U.S. reactors: Duke Power's Catawba 1&2 near Rock Hill, South Carolina; McGuire 1&2, near Charlotte, North Carolina; and Virginia Power's North Anna 1&2 reactors near Charlottesville, Virginia. Physicians for Social Responsibility has actively opposed the MOX plan since its inception, primarily on the grounds that it promotes nuclear proliferation, rather than delivering the goal of making the plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons unavailable for further destructive purposes. The Atlanta chapter of the national organization has led professionals in the region in their action to oppose the commercialization of plutonium. "Citizens everywhere want nuclear weapons abolished," said Ed Arnold, Executive Director of PSR/Atlanta. "We don't accomplish that by recirculating nuclear weapons material. And we don't abolish nuclear weapons by shipping bomb-grade plutonium all over the planet. This MOX program encourages nuclear proliferation and we must stop it." NIRS, which launched a "NIX MOX" campaign in 1998, recently opened a Southeastern office to assist BREDL and other grassroots groups opposing MOX fuel usage and the spending of hundreds of millions in public funds to subsidize MOX fabrication, utility acceptance and reprocessing. "Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy and under utility deregulation is going to be subject to tough competition. The MOX program provides direct tax dollars to underwrite more dirty, dangerous nuclear waste production," said Kevin Kamps, nuclear specialist with NIRS. "This is an unfair subsidy that will disadvantage safer and cheaper power sources that have less hazardous byproducts. This is another reason that we are committed to stopping the MOX mistake." "The people in the Southeast have gotten the picture loud and clear from the first shipment of MOX fuel to Canada that the US DOE will lie, cover their actions, take a cloak of secrecy and act above not only the law of the land, but also international treaty in order to accomplish their goals" affirmed Mary Olson, Director of NIRS Southeast Office. She continued, "This is the old National Security mythology applied to a so-called commercial enterprise, but in the end it is taxpayer dollars that are funding this program, so we are proud to support citizens in taking action to stop this charade." The first MOX shipment to Canada included transport within Canada by helicopter, despite DOE's acknowledgement that the MOX casks were not certified for air transport and the agency's assurances that no air travel would be involved "The use of MOX creates more bomb possibilities around the world, not fewer," said Terry Lodge, an attorney for the plaintiffs. "Instead of rolling plutonium up in two-ton glass logs and disposing of it under heavy guard, our government instead wants to show the world how to fuel low-security civilian nuclear plants with it. There will be lots of scary new members to the 'Nuclear Club' if we do this." Trial activity will resume on April 7 on the issues of whether the Russian shipment must be stopped because of claimed violations of federal environmental law and violation of the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. -NIRS/BREDL/PSR ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-04.17.00-07:05:42-7878