Sunday, September 2, 2007

Steve Cone: US 'lapdogs' for corporate uranium




"We are sick and tired of government agencies such as the NRC acting as lapdogs for corporate interests to sanction and accelerate a culture of environmental degradation which threatens to transform the Southwestern United States into a National Energy Sacrifice Area." Steve Cone

Comment to: Chief, Rules Review and Directives Branch
Mail Stop T-6D59
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, D.C. 20555-0001
FROM: Steve Cone
"electors Concerned about Animas Water" -- CAW
1217 Chaco Avenue
Farmington, NM 87401


By Steve Cone

The "numerous license applications for in-situ leach uranium milling facilities" anticipated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ["NRC"] must be reviewed and assessed individually and separately by the NRC -- not severally, and superficially as outlined in your offensive Generic Environmental Impact Statement ["GEIS"] proposal.
We are sick and tired of government agencies such as the NRC acting as lapdogs for corporate interests to sanction and accelerate a culture of environmental degradation which threatens to transform the Southwestern United States into a National Energy Sacrifice Area. Streamlining and fast-tracking this GEIS process --specifically designed to poison our air, land, and water resources-- involves the NRC's out-and-out collusion with the uranium mining industry, portending an horrific assault on endangered species and a gross miscarriage of environmental justice for indigenous populations and their neighbors, who refuse to see their homes and health sacrificed to increase the profits of a government-favored special interest group.
NRC are considering blanket permitting of what -- a million square miles of proposed project area in this GEIS? You intend to discount the diversity of habitats by treating unique systems and communities generically, as opposed to individually, all in the name of bureaucratic "efficiency". If prepared as proposed, the NRC's GEIS would totally subvert safeguards in the Environmental Protection Act and systematically gut protections inherent in the National Environmental Policy Act.
NRC's track record for enforcing "required" restoration and/or "mitigation" of environmental damage associated with both in-situ and conventional uranium milling operations, is best characterized as dismal. How could you ever be so deluded as to think that the public would grant you additional discretion to wreak even greater havoc?
How dare the NRC presume to squelch public comment and suppress citizen participation in the NEPA process!
Reverse course now, adopt the no-action alternative, and get the hell out of dodge, or prepare to be tarred and feathered by those you seek to marginalize -- described on your website as the "lower population density" in "the western states".
[Federal Register: July 24, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 141)]
[Notices]
[Page 40344-40346]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [
wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr24jy07-139]



Photo: Top: Navajo uranium miners Second photo: BURNED BY THE ORE: Gilbert Badoni, Navajo, holds a poster showing his family, all cancer victims of uranium mining, after his father worked as a uranium miner. Badoni, shown in lower left of poster, lives in Cudei near Shiprock, NM on the Navajo Nation, where radioactive rocks remained in his backyard/Photo Brenda Norrell

No comments:

Post a Comment