Photo: Tribes Wonder if ‘Environmental Racism’ Is Behind Nuke Storage Plan

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Yucca Mountain

The Western Shoshone and Timbisha Shoshone Tribes are opposing a federal plan to store nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain. (Courtesy U.S. Department of Energy)

Photo: Tribes Wonder if ‘Environmental Racism’ Is Behind Nuke Storage Plan

By:

ICTMN Staff

10/9/15

A proposal to store nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain, shelved by President Barack Obama in 2010, has been revived. And both the Western Shoshone and Timbisha Shoshone tribes have termed the plan “environmental racism.”

According to an environmental impact report, the plan involves carving 40 miles of tunnels under the sacred mountain and burying 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste there. The fact that even a small amount could leach into the groundwater, affecting the purity of American Indian springs in Death Valley, has many residents against the project, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on September 26.

“From our perspective the processes employed by the DOE is environmental racism designed to systematically dismantle the living ‘lifeways’ of the Western Shoshone people in relation to our land,” said Western Shoshone member Ian Zabarte, a board member of the Native Community Action Council, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

This image was featured in this week’s Indian Country Today Media Network newsletter.