BLACKJACK The Evil Nuclear Cartoon!

Timbisha Shoshone to Obama: Adopt UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Greetings. Upon this historical event, we wish to thank you for your commitment and dedication to bring forth meaningful change for our Peoples. On behalf of the Timbisha Shoshone of the Western Shoshone Nation and the many other Nations and Pueblos of Indigenous Peoples of North America, we call upon the government of the United States of America (USA) to act in due haste to adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly Resolution #61/295 at its 107th plenary on September 13, 2007.
We are confident that through your leadership and peacemaking goals as exemplified in your membership on the UN Human Rights Council, you will adopt this historic human rights instrument. We ask for this action immediately.

Join The Caravan In Support Of Big Mountain Resistance Communities of Black Mesa, AZ.

We are excited to inform you that a caravan of work crews will once again be converging from across the country in support of residents of the Big Mountain regions of Black Mesa. On behalf of their peoples, their sacred ancestral lands and future generations, these communities continue to carry out a staunch resistance to the efforts of the US Government, which is acting in the interests of the Peabody Coal Company, to devastate whole communities and ecosystems and greatly de-stabilize our planet’s climate for the profit of an elite few.

Cause Announcement from Dooda (No) Desert Rock

Cause Announcement from Dooda (No) Desert Rock GREAT NEWS folks: US EPA Environmental Appeals Board Remands PSD Permit for the desert rock energy project! Celebration information coming forth! Here’s another opportunity for you to contribute to DDR, we need your help! FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 25, 2009 Contact: Elouise Brown, Dooda (NO) Desert Rock Committee [...]

Navajos Observe 30th Anniversary of Uranium Spill

CHURCH ROCK, N.M.—Community members and environmental activists commemorated July 16 as the 30th anniversary of a massive uranium tailings spill that Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. called “the largest peacetime accidental release of radioactive contaminated materials in the history of the United States.”

The accident occurred when an earthen dam, operated by the United Nuclear Corp., failed and let loose 94 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the north fork of the Rio Puerco on Navajo Nation lands. Within days, contaminated tailings liquid was found 50 miles downstream in Arizona.

About 100 Navajos and non-Navajos, including members of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE) and other environmental groups, walked a five-mile stretch through the remote mesa lands of Church Rock to the site of the July 16, 1979 spill. They stopped at Larry King’s ranch along New Mexico Highway 566 for a speech by the Navajo president.

BLACK TIDE

Meanwhile the Kingston plant was incinerating 5 million tons of coal every year and dumping the ash at the edge of the river. Every so often, bulldozers would sculpt bottom ash, the heavy and coarse material left in the furnaces, and dirt into the dike, raising it a few feet one year and a few feet more another year, then add interior barriers until it was actually several ponds—cells, in the jargon—enclosed by one massive levee. It grew longer and wider and higher, but the sides were always seeded with grass so that after more than fifty years it had come to resemble a well-manicured mesa, standing upwards of sixty feet high on eighty-four acres of riverbank. And if a little ash water seeped out, which it had for decades, or part of the dike blew out, which it did in 2003, the TVA dutifully patched the walls and mopped up the puddles, and nobody fretted about it because nobody paid it much mind.

The dike was not merely breached. It did not spring a leak. It collapsed, most of the northern and western walls disintegrating into mud and mush just before one o’clock in the morning on December 22. When it fell away, the wet ash behind it—more than a billion gallons of gray slurry, a hundred times more than the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez—gushed out with the fury of a reservoir bursting through a dam, which, really, was exactly what it was.

But it’s still filthy. Getting it out of the ground, depending on the method used, is at best dirty and dangerous and at worst ecologically ruinous. Washing it—literally cleaning it—is a grimy process that often involves filling valleys and hollows with lakes of poisonous black water held back by dikes not unlike the one that collapsed at Kingston. Burning it releases an assortment of toxins that, according to one study, kill an estimated 24,000 people each year—people who, on average, die fourteen years before they otherwise would have. The Kingston plant, for instance, primarily uses a low-sulfur coal and has scrubbers to capture nitrogen oxides, yet in 2007 its stacks still vented approximately 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 12,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,700 tons of hydrochloric acid, 329 tons of sulfuric acid, and ten tons of ammonia, as well as lesser (though not insignificant) amounts of arsenic, barium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, vanadium, and zinc—all of which, in case that sounds like a multivitamin, are not things anyone should be breathing. That’s the inventory from only nine furnaces in east Tennessee; there are 1,470 more incinerating coal in 616 other power plants across the country—roughly a third of which have no pollution controls at all. Finally, there is carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is helping steam the planet to perhaps catastrophic temperatures; coal burned in the United States each year releases about 2 billion tons of CO2, a full third of the nation’s entire output of that particular gas.

Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) Permit for the Desert Rock Energy Facility

In 2004, Sithe Global Power, LLC. proposed construction of the Desert Rock Energy Facility, a new 1500 megawatt coal-fired power plant on the Navajo Nation tribal reservation, approximately 25 miles southwest of Farmington, New Mexico. In consideration of over 1,000 oral and written comments received during an extended public comment period in 2006, EPA made a final decision on July 31, 2008 to issue a Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit for this facility. The administrative record for the initial permit is available through regulations.gov. See docket EPA-R09-OAR-2007-1110.Exiting EPA (disclaimer)

Following EPA’s final permit decision, several parties appealed that decision to the Agency’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB). The Desert Rock Energy Company can not begin construction of the facility until this appeal process is completed. Documents filed in the appeal are available in the Desert Rock Energy Company, LLC docket on the EAB’s website.

On January 7, 2009 EPA notified the EAB that it was withdrawing a portion of our permitting decision for further consideration. Following the withdrawal EPA prepared an addendum to the statement of basis for the permit which addresses the issue of whether a final PSD permit for the Desert Rock Energy Company should contain emissions limitations for carbon dioxide. EPA requested public comments on this addendum from January 22, 2009 through March 25, 2009. The administrative record for the addendum to the statement of basis is available through regulations.gov. See docket EPA-R09-OAR-2009-0259. Exiting EPA (disclaimer)

NATIONAL GRASSROOTS CALL-IN DAY TO STOP NUKE/COAL SUBSIDIES

NATIONAL GRASSROOTS CALL-IN DAY TO STOP NUKE/COAL SUBSIDIES

THURSDAY, APRIL 30

LET’S KEEP CONGRESSIONAL PHONES RINGING ALL DAY LONG!

April 24, 2009

Dear Friends,

Both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are beginning to consider separate legislation that could have an enormous impact on our nation’s energy future. It is essential that we all weigh in now, in the strongest possible manner, to help shape that energy future. Let’s tell Congress loud and clear to support renewable energy and energy efficiency programs and to stop any more taxpayer support for dirty and dangerous nuclear power and coal technologies.

Washington-based groups like NIRS, PSR, FoE, NRDC and others are working hard to stop this legislation from becoming a gift to the nuclear power and coal industries. But the nuclear and coal industries have far more lobbyists and far more money than we do.

What those industries don’t have is YOU.

And YOU can make the difference.

On Thursday, April 30, let’s keep the phones in the Senate and House ringing all day long with a simple message: YES to renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, NO to any more taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power and coal.

Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121.

In the Senate, the Senate Energy Committee will begin considering a major new energy bill sponsored by Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Efforts will be made to add nuclear power to the bill’s Renewable Electricity Standard, to add nuclear power to a so-called “Clean Energy Bank,” to add still more taxpayer loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors and coal plants, and so forth.

In the House, the House Energy Committee will begin considering the Waxman-Markey climate crisis legislation. And we’re going to see similar efforts in the House to add the same kind of nuclear and coal nonsense.

On April 30, please call both of your Senators and your Representative with the simple message: YES to renewables and efficiency, NO to nuclear power and coal.

And to help set the stage for thousands of phone calls, let’s now start clogging the Congressional e-mail boxes with thousands of your letters! You can e-mail your Senators here and you can e-mail your Representative here.

Please forward this Alert as widely as possible, please make sure all your friends and colleagues know about it and can participate. Post the info on your websites, blogs, Facebook & MySpace pages, Twitter it, spread the word! It will take many thousands of us to overcome the nuclear and coal industry’s lobbying efforts. But we CAN do it!

And please consider supporting our outreach and mobilization efforts with your contribution here. Honestly, your donations of any amount are both needed and very gratefully appreciated. We can’t do this work without you!

And now for some good news: yesterday, the Missouri utility Ameren UE announced that it is suspending its plans to build a new EPR reactor, Callaway-2! Congratulations to everyone in Missouri and elsewhere who have worked so hard to block Ameren’s plans to force ratepayers to pre-pay for this proposed reactor!

And some more good news: yesterday we learned that the FY 2010 budget resolution will NOT include the amendments from Sen. Crapo to support $50 billion in new taxpayer loan guarantees for new reactors and additional funding for reprocessing technologies. Again, thank you to everyone who took action over the past two weeks to object to those provisions!

Maybe it sometimes doesn’t seem like making a couple phone calls or sending some e-mails, or even contributing $5 or $10, makes a difference: but it does! And we’ve already seen it several times this year. Now we’re asking you to take action again–because your actions CAN make the difference.

We will keep you posted on the progress of the Senate Energy Bill and House Climate Bill. But please send your letters in now, call on April 30, and spread the word!

Thanks for all you do,

Michael Mariotte

Executive Director

Nuclear Information and Resource Service

nirsnet@nirs.org

www.nirs.org

New Mexico questions Desert Rock fish impact

WINDOW ROCK — New Mexico Environment Department has requested a meeting with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to discuss the impacts of emissions from the proposed Desert Rock power plant on threatened and endangered species.

NMED Secretary Ron Curry sent a letter March 30 to the service’s New Mexico Ecological Services Field Office Supervisor Wally Murphy requesting a meeting to discuss the biological assessment for the plant.

“The assessment indicates 13 chemicals of potential concern, including high levels of mercury and selenium, will be emitted from the proposed Desert Rock facility and will impact the San Juan River and the Rio Grande,” Curry stated in the letter.

AGs air Desert Rock permit concerns

WINDOW ROCK — The attorneys general of New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and Vermont have jointly submitted comments to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency voicing concerns regarding the proposed issuance of an air quality permit for construction of the Desert Rock power plant.

The attorneys general said they believe EPA’s Region 9 cannot properly rely on a memo from former EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, issued about a month before the Bush administration left office, as the basis for refusing to impose the “best available control technology” requirement for carbon dioxide.

“Rushed through without an opportunity for public comment, the Johnson memo was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act,” they said.