Hello friends and neighbors and hopefully aging No Nukers.....
I moved with my family 3 years ago to my wife's hometown and we are about 21 miles from the Savannah River Site or SRS where we have been making nuclear weapons since the mid 50's. It is the most radioactive site in the country! Please read below and weep with me and then get mad!
We stopped the power indrustry in their tracks in the 80's and it was the grass roots groups that care about the safety of their kids and the health of the planet that did it with a little help from their friends in the music biz. We need to stop them again before they build their "Nuclear Parks" in every third town in our country.
This is a big one. Please get informed and join the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth to fight these proposed South Carolina Nukes. We just stopped them building a new coal plant on the Pee Dee river here and we can keep on stopping them. Greed is a powerful enemy but I still say "No Nukes!"
If you want to refresh your memory, you can still get the No Nukes cd at Amazon. I just did 3 weeks ago so I could learn John Hall's beautiful song "Power". There is some great music and a lot of important info about radiation,safety,cancer and the dangers of nuclear waste in the cd booklet.
This is a excerpt from a letter from a lady who saw me at a Green Fair in Charleston a couple weeks ago.
Friends of the Earth and Sierra Club are the only groups that work against building more reactors. All the other conservation groups say it is politically unpopular to challenge our leaders and their utility company masters on this subject. The other groups also say that if they oppose nuclear energy, our leaders will think they are a bunch of kooks. This atmosphere makes it difficult for the 8 to 10 anti-nuclear activist that haven't escaped SC to get our message out. Our message being that nukes are way too expensive (9 billion each), conservation would be cheaper (the utilities have most officials convinced that South Carolinians are too dumb to insulate their homes and that solar and wind are impossible in SC) and the waste lasts for close to forever (the officials and DOE claim that Yucca is going to make a comeback).
Since the Obama administration canceled Yucca, plan B for the nation's radioactive waste is to build an "energy park" at SRS which entails building a reprocessing facility for the all 65,000 metric tons of US commercial nuke waste. SRS already has the distinction of being the most radioactive site in the nation. That is if you count curies and not volume. Most of the curies are stored in the Tank Farm, which holds 35 million gallons of liquid nuke waste left over from reprocessing nuclear fuel during the 50's to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons. The reason our DOE site is favored is due to the port in Charleston and a state full of people who consider plutonium and uranium commodities instead of a liabilities. To make matters worse, there is congressional language that says once a state agrees to take the nation's spent fuel rods, they get to hold on to it even if a reprocessing facility is never built. At least some of SC's other conservation groups see the folly in bringing tons of waste here with zero exit strategy.
I haven't mentioned the MOX facility at SRS, which they are building to dismantle nuclear weapons and turn into reactor fuel, which no utilities want to burn. Or the reprocessing of international waste from all the research reactors around the world. Or the scandal involving the 1.6 billion dollars of stimulus money that SRS received this year. I didn't want to ruin your day.
Jesse
