HELP RELEASE NEW HIGH-LEVEL WASTE TRANSPORT MAPS!

Please forward!
ACTION ALERT
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

HELP RELEASE NEW HIGH-LEVEL WASTE TRANSPORT MAPS!

Dear Friends – Please help NIRS Southeast Office release to the media in your community a NEW set of MAPS showing projected high-level radioactive waste road, rail, and waterway routes from commercial reactors to two possible “interim” storage and reprocessing sites under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) plan--Savannah River Site and Barnwell in South Carolina.

We are inviting you to hold a press conference in your community to unveil these new maps on May 22nd (or on a later date that works for you) to inform, and warn, your media markets. Please respond to Mary Olson (828-675-1792, nirs@main.nc.us) if you would like to participate! If a press conference is too much to pull off, please consider helping by sending out the report and a press release to your media list. The idea is to get the word – and the maps – out there!

If you can organize a press conference or distribution of materials to your press list, we will supply you with: the maps (hard copy and electronic), the link to the full report (embargoed until May 22), press advisory and press release. You can use our prepared materials, adapt them, or create your own. We encourage you to use your own letterhead/logos–and to add local details about the roads, rails and water routes to the materials, where possible.

This event is intended to be a second edition of a highly successful January 1995 event when the Nevada projection of waste transport routes to Yucca were released in 110 locations on the same day. I hope you will make the time to be part of this event.

Mary Olson Kevin Kamps
NIRS Southeast Office NIRS

P.S. If, in the coming weeks or months, you would like to host report author John Sticpewich, NIRS Southeast Office director Mary Olson, and/or NIRS nuclear waste specialist Kevin Kamps, in your community to present on high-level radioactive waste transport risks, please contact Mary Olson to make arrangements.

BACKGROUND
The report, produced by the NC Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads campaign, is a case study showing nuclear power plants north of the Carolinas and east of the Mississippi River (the vast majority in the U.S.) shipping their wastes by highway, railway, and waterway to South Carolina. It is not intended to dismiss other sites targeted for possible GNEP development, nor to discount the risks of transporting wastes outside that geographic scope to the Carolinas. Hopefully, the interest garnered by the publication of this case study will help attract further support and resources that could lead to additional analyses, examining other sites targeted for these GNEP facilities, and the transport routes that would be impacted by moving high-level radioactive wastes to those locations.

GNEP would require the shipment of highly radioactive irradiated fuel (high-level radioactive waste) from reactor sites to a central location (is GNEP just a new name for “centralized interim storage”/parking lot dump?). One of our most powerful tools in organizing opposition to the flawed and unsuitable Yucca Mountain dump has been the maps showing projected waste transport routes from atomic reactors across the U.S., through 45 states and the District of Columbia, to Nevada.

The new maps have been produced by John Sticpewich, of the Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads campaign. John used the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) database of irradiated fuel assemblies as of 2002 (the most current available, if you can believe THAT, considering that every year, 2,000 to 3,000 additional tons of high-level radioactive waste are generated at commercial reactors across the U.S.), and the DOE mapping program (TRAGIS) that plots primary and alternate routes for truck, train and barge. Because of the scale of the task, John defined a study area – and looked at the shipment of waste from reactors that lie East of the Mississippi River and North of Savannah River Site. The report shows that every state East of the Mississippi River will have transport of waste through it – by road, rail, or barge; however shipments originating at reactors in the states of MS, AL, GA and FL are not included in the analysis. We regret this–but since 2/3 of the US reactors are covered in the Study area, the decision was to go forward, given limited resources. We have to simply say, this is a “case study.”

It is noteworthy that a number of states with no reactors nor high-level radioactive wastes within their borders–such as Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia–would still see high-level radioactive waste shipments travel through bound for GNEP sites in South Carolina. Also important to point out are the numerous barge routes possible on the Great Lakes, rivers, and Atlantic coastline.

As ever, NIRS brings the transport issue to the fore not because we oppose the movement of nuclear materials in every case–but because we see the transport of nuclear waste for a really bad plan or for plans that would result in extending or multiplying waste transport (the radioactive waste shell game), as reckless and wrong. We also see that the greatest number of people that will be impacted by implementation of GNEP (whether due to accidents, attacks, or even “routine” radiation exposures from “incident-free” shipments) are those along the transport corridors.
The groups taking part in this May 22nd day of action thus far include:
Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads, WNC
Physicians for Social Responsibility of Western North Carolina
STOP I-3, WNC
NIRS, Takoma Park & WNC
South Carolina Alliance for Sustainable Campuses + Communities, Columbia SC
Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, NC, VA
Nuclear Watch South, Atlanta, GA
Atlanta WAND
HIPWAZEE Columbia (SC)
Environmentalists Inc. , Columbia SC
Citizens For Environmental Justice, Savannah, GA
South Carolina Chapter, Sierra Club
North American Water Office, Lake Elmo MN
Southern Nevada Group of the Toiyable Chapter of the Sierra Club
Citizen Action Coalition of Indiana
Yggdrasil/Earth Island, Kentucky
NatCap Inc.
Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power (PA)
Don't Waste Connecticut
Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone
GRAMMES
Citizen Alert, Las Vegas NV
Carolina Peace Resource Center
Energy Justice Network (PA)
Don't Waste Michigan
Nuclear Energy Information Service (Illinois)
Earth Day Coalition (Cleveland, OH)
What ELSE You Can Do
If your group hasn’t already, please consider signing onto the “Statement of Principles for Safeguarding Nuclear Waste at Reactors.” See the statement and current list of groups signed on at: http://www.citizen.org/documents/PrinciplesSafeguardingIrradiatedFuel.pdf
To sign on, email Michele Boyd at Public Citizen at mboyd@citizen.org or Kevin Kamps at NIRS at kevin@nirs.org. This statement, already signed by over 130 groups, urges Congress to require that high-level radioactive wastes stored on-site at reactors be better protected against accidents and attacks, as an alternative to rushing “Mobile Chernobyls” and “dirty bombs on wheels” onto the roads, rails, and waterways bound for “centralized interim storage sites” (radioactive waste shell game) or dangerous and dirty GNEP reprocessing plants.
Nuclear Information & Resource Service
Southeast Office PO Box 7586 Asheville, NC 28802
828-675-1792 nirs@main.nc.us
www.nirs.org

NATIONAL OFFICE ADDRESS AND PHONE:
Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS)/World Information Service on Energy (WISE)
6930 Carroll Ave, Suite 340, Takoma Park, MD 20912
301-270-NIRS fax 301-270-4291 nirsnet@nirs.org

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