PAGE 1 PAGE 6 Desert Voices Newsletter Nevada Desert Experience 1420 West Bartlett Avenue Summer 2015 Las Vegas, NV 89106 Volume 28 Issue No. 1 Making History and Uranium Waste for NNSS NDE is very happy to by Judy Treichel announce the arrival of our Building a Future PLEASE SEE OUR WEBSITE FOR FULL ARTICLE: two new office managers by Brian Terrell Ming and Laura-Marie. They www.NevadaDesertExperience.org/waste.htm are both current NDE council On March 26, I was in Nevada in my role members and have graciously as event coordinator for Nevada Desert There are significant and bad differences offered to live at NDE©s Experience, preparing for the annual Sacred between this program and the Yucca headquarters and take care of Peace Walk, a 65-mile trek through the Mountain repository project. There is no the day-to-day work of NDE. desert from Las Vegas to the nuclear Test Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) They will be doing this as full Site at Mercury, NV, an event that NDE has licensing required at [NNSS] or any of the time volunteers. We are all truly sponsored each spring for about 20 years. weapons production facilities. There is not blessed and grateful to them. Two days before the walk was to begin, a even certification by the Environmental car load of us organizers traced the route. Protection Agency (EPA) as there is at the Welcome Laura-Marie and Ming. The last stop on the traditional itinerary Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico or is the ªPeace Camp,º a place in the desert EPA standards that apply to repositories. where we usually stay the last night before Ironically, the EPA is about to move their crossing Highway 95 into what is now mobile radiation detection lab from Las known as the Nevada National Security Site Vegas to Mobile, AL. The casks that would Save These Dates For Desert Justice Events: 2015 & 2016 (NNSS). When we got there we were be used for transport and the containers to surprised to find the entire camp and the be put in the landfill are not licensed by the N September 19 th to 21 st Justice For Our Desert (Vegas, NNSS, YM, & Creech way leading from it to the Test Site NRC either. All facets of this program are surrounded by bright orange plastic snow developed and overseen by the [Department Ce!ebrate "ustice#ma$i%g a%& get %o%'io!e%ce trai%i%g( More i%)o o% page * fencing. Of Energy (DOE)] exclusively. N Ja% uar+ 1 , th 2-1. M/0 Da+ 1ara&e i% /as Vegas There was no apparent reason for the A high-level waste repository would th th fence and no apparent access into the camp, accept only specific and known waste forms. N March 19 # 2 2 Sacre& 1eace 3a!$ ()rom Vegas to NNSS which had been a staging area for During the time that DOE was deciding to N March 2. th #4pri! 1 st Shut Do5% Creech 62 anti-nuclear testing protests since 1986. Not ship the U233 and U235 wastes to NNSS, only were we blocked from our traditional they revised the waste acceptance criteria so camp site, there was no safe, legal or that this highly radioactive material, some of Ca!! ND7 or emai! ND7 )or more i%)o8 9-2(.*.(*,1* or i%)o:Ne'a&aDesert7;perie%ce(org convenient place to park vehicles for about a it weapons grade, could be considered mile around, nowhere that we could even low-level waste. So in this case, the drop off equipment or allow for dropping off classification fits the waste, not the other those participants in our protest who could way around as Nevadans have assumed... not make the long walk over rough terrain. Any future repository is planned to be a We were only beginning to assess the deep geologic disposal facility. The low-level logistic difficulties this new situation waste disposal at Area 5 at NNSS is shallow presented when a Nye County Sheriff's land burial in trenches. The [uranium] deputy drove by. wastes remain radioactively dangerous for After warning us that it was illegal to be hundreds of thousands of years, far longer stopped on the road as we were, the deputy than any metal container or trench liner allowed us to tarry while he explained the would last... situation as he saw it. Some big shots at the While Nevadans continue to accept and college, he said, had convinced the Nevada dispose of less dangerous, actual low-level Department of Transportation that the weapons waste at NNSS, we will not accept Peace Camp is a site of historical opening the door for far more radioactive significance and so could not be messed materials to be thrown into our ground.We with. The fences went up just a week or so need to tell DOE that changing the rules to CONTINUED on PAGE 2 fit the waste is not a workable solution. PAGE 2 Desert Voices Newsletter PAGE 5 Desert Voices Newsletter Living History CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Living History CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2 earlier, he said, in anticipation of the Sacred Peace Walk. The artifacts of past protests The chief archeologist for the Department of Transportation was particularly effusive in would not be allowed to be disturbed by the presence of contemporary protestors. No one his high estimation of the significance of Peace Camp. Peace Camp is the only designated but archeologists, the deputy told us, would ever be allowed in the camp again. The irony historic site in Nevada, he boasted, that is less than 50 years old. My own experience with of this picture was not lost on us. Peace Camp and the Test Site, is perhaps less than historic. I was there once at the height Returning to Las Vegas, I immediately started calling various offices of the Department of protests there in 1987, again sometime in the 1990s, and then with increasing of Transportation, especially the numbers I found (to some surprise) for the DOT's office frequency after the protests against drones operated out of nearby Creech Air Force Base of archeology. I also did a web search of issues around Peace Camp and its history and began in 2009. found that in 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (the BLM claims ownership of Until this encounter, I confess that I thought of Peace Camp as little more than a the site) and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office had determined that Peace convenient place from which to stage protests against nuclear bomb tests conducted on Camp is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. the other side of Highway 95. I read in Archeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, and The mushroom clouds of the first tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site could be seen other publications how some anthropologists from the Desert Research Institute had from far off Las Vegas. The Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 moved the tests researched the site and successfully made the case that Peace Camp is eligible for listing underground. Although the United States did not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban on the National Register of Historic Places. I read that to be eligible, a site must meet Treaty, it stopped full scale testing in 1992, though ªsubcriticalº testing of weapons, tests these qualifications: ªa) association with events that have made a significant contribution that stop short of self-sustained chain reactions, are still conducted at the site. to the broad patterns of our history, and b) embodiment of distinctive characteristics... From 1986 through 1994, 536 demonstrations were held at the Nevada Test Site that possess high artistic values...º involving 37,488 participants, with some 15,740 arrests. Many of the demonstrations in While the implications of this designation for us were still unclear, it was gratifying to those years attracted thousands at a time. This year's Sacred Peace Walk and our April 3 know that at least a couple of agencies in the federal and state bureaucracies recognize, Good Friday protest at the NNSS was modest in comparison, with about 50 participants, along with some of the academic anthropological community, the fact that a couple of and we were happy that 22 of these were arrested after crossing into the site. generations of antinuclear activists had ªmade a significant contribution to the broad The numbers coming to protest testing in Nevada decreased sharply with the end of patterns of our history.º Designs, symbols and messages affected by arrangements of rock full scale testing there, and it is not surprising that nuclear testing is not the burning of different colors and sizes (ªgeoglyphs,º in archeology talk), alabaster statues called the cause of the times. Protests at sites more directly involved with nuclear weapons Shadow Children, and the development still gather larger numbers. Just three weeks before our most recent protest, graffiti scrawled on tunnels about 200 protestors camped outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base, the hub of drone under the highway have official murders just down the highway from the NNSS. recognition that they ªpossess It is crucial, though, that some of us keep showing up at the test site and using our high artistic valuesº deserving to bodies to add to the slowly growing tally of those who risk arrest there to say no to the be protected by law! unspeakable horror of nuclear war. We had already left Las Vegas Thousands of workers still drive each morning from Las Vegas to report for work at the on our five day trek to the Test NNSS.