Since early February, protesters from five Native
American tribes have camped out near a proposed nuclear waste
storage site in Ward Valley, Calif. The Bureau of Land Management,
which wants to finish studying the site, ordered the 30 or so
people off the land by Feb. 19.
But on Feb. 25,
the BLM stopped policing the site. So far, the agency has not
ordered any arrests, and the standoff
continues.
“The tribes are
furious that (the Department of) Interior totally ignored tribal
and environmental concerns,” says Steve Lopez, a spokesman for the
Fort Mojave Indian tribe.
The proposed 90-acre
project on BLM land near Needles, Calif., would use unlined
trenches to store low-level radioactive waste from Arizona,
California, North Dakota and South Dakota. The site would be
administered by the California Department of Health Services, but
in order for the site to open, the BLM must first transfer the land
to California. The state’s Department of Health Services has sued
the federal agency for delaying the transfer, which tribal groups
and some environmentalists are determined to block with their
sit-in.
Molly Johnson of Save Ward Valley, a
local environmental coalition, says the dump is too close to the
Colorado River – just 18 miles away – and that it could harm both
the Colorado River aquifer and habitat of the threatened desert
tortoise. U.S. Ecology, the private company contracted to manage
the site, she adds, has had problems with liquid waste leakage at a
similarly designed site in Beatty, Nev. “This is a failed
technology that obviously doesn’t work,” she
says.
Peter Baldridge, a staff attorney for the
California Department of Health Services, acknowledges the leakage
problems in Beatty but says that the Ward Valley site would accept
only solid waste.
Meanwhile, the protesters, who
call themselves the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance, say
they will camp on the contested land until they are granted “nation
to nation” consultation with federal agencies about the proposed
project. BLM spokeswoman Carole Levitzky says the agency is
negotiating with the protesters.
For more
information, contact Save Ward Valley at 760/326-6267 or the
Needles District of the BLM at
760/326-7000.
” Michelle
Nijhuis
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tribes protest Ward Valley dump site.
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