The Texas-Vermont-Maine Nuclear Dump: Bringing Environmental Racism Home [View all]

[RandySF]

Posted in 1998:


This past August, Vermont activists were visited by a delegation of long-time antinuclear activists from West Texas, three of whom spent ten days touring Vermont and meeting with both activists and public officials. They testified at the State House, and before the State Nuclear Advisory Panel. They participated in a five day walk for the abolition of nuclear weapons, met with Rep. Sanders, one of the compact’s leading proponents, and spent a few days at an antinuclear activist camp in southern Vermont. On August 22, they were joined by two Sierra Blanca residents, who spoke at a large antinuclear rally in the southern Vermont town of Brattleboro. The rally, the camp, and a subsequent civil disobedience action at the gates of Vermont’s sole nuclear plant, were part of an effort by the regional Citizen’s Awareness Network and the D.C.-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service to launch a major new Nuclear Free New England Campaign, and rekindle some of the energies that made nuclear power such a powerful public issue in New England in the late 1970s and early eighties.

The Texans shared many years of experiences of fighting the Sierra Blanca nuclear dump, a struggle that has already lasted some fifteen years. Vermonters heard of numerous encounters with the nuclear industry and Governor Bush’s representatives. They were told about concrete test canisters that are already cracking, and of dramatic testimony presented in innumerable public gatherings against the proposed dump. We shared documentary evidence showing that all of the arguments put forward in favor of the dump are misleading and essentially fraudulent. We all gained a much clearer understanding of the politics of nuclear waste in the late 1990s, and the unseemly political maneuvers which have created this nuclear atrocity in our names.

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Twenty Texas counties and five Mexican states passed resolutions against the dump, and the Mexican Congress has repeatedly expressed its opposition, but public discussion of the nuclear compact in Vermont seemed limited to an occasional Letter to the Editor. This spring, however, a number of events helped re-energize the debate. On April 16th, a city councilor from the town of Juárez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Sierra Blanca, began a 24 day hunger strike, which brought numerous letters of protest from Mexican officials to the planned nuclear dump. A number of Vermont activists once again began to take notice.

The Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club, in cooperation with activists from West Texas, gave the issue a high priority in its summer campaigns, due to the impending congressional vote. On May 1st, Texas activist and radio host Jim Hightower went to Burlington to speak at a major fundraiser for Bernie Sanders, who has played an especially vocal role in ushering the nuclear compact through Congress. Sierra Club members and others gathered outside the Sheraton Hotel to voice their objections to the Sierra Blanca dump and Vermont’s role in creating it. Hightower made his objections clear in his speech to hundreds of Sanders supporters inside.

On May 11th, about a dozen activists met with Sanders at his office. The delegation included two University of Vermont students who had just completed a thorough analysis of the scientific arguments in support of the Texas dump; they found numerous unanswered questions and more than a few outright falsehoods in the proponents’ arguments. Several participants in the meeting were astonished by the “independent” congressman’s vehement and unrelenting support for shipping nuclear waste 2400 miles to West Texas. It was the best site geologically, he claimed, much better than having nuclear waste scattered across the country, and besides, how dare we accuse Bernie Sanders of environmental racism? The August meeting with the Texas delegation featured Sanders at his most obstinate, insisting that he’d done the right thing and that he was no longer interested in the issue now that the compact bill had passed the House.



http://social-ecology.org/wp/1998/10/the-texas-vermont-maine-nuclear-dump-bringing-environmental-racism-home/