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IF you are from Colorado Call Ed Permutter!!! No funding for Yucca Mountain

June 14, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

Urge Members of U.S. House of Representatives Rules Committee to Block the Shimkus Amendment, Which Would Restore Yucca Nuke Waste Dump Funding! Yucca Nuclear Storage is not safe. In an earthquake zone and up river from the Amaragosa River which irrigates farmland and provide water, the Western Shoshone Oppose place this pollution on their sacred land, and the people of Nevada in general oppose becoming a nuclear dump. Plus…the nuclear industry is not the answer to Global Climate Change — too expensive, too many “unintended consequences”.

The Fiscal Year 2020 Energy & Water Appropriations Bill will be voted on, on the U.S. House Floor, later this week. U.S. Rep. Shimkus (Republican-IL) has proposed an amendment, to add tens of millions of dollars of Yucca nuke waste dump funding, into the bill. At 5pm Eastern today, the U.S. House Rules Committee will vote, on whether to allow this amendment to move to the full House floor. This amendment must be blocked! (Sorry for the short notice, but we’ve only just gotten this news ourselves!)

Is your U.S. Representative on the House Rules Committee? If yes, your call/email/fax to their office could make a big difference! If not, please alert anyone you know in any of the following members’ congressional districts, to take action themselves!

Here is the list of U.S. House Rules Committee members:

Majority (Democratic) Members Minority (Republican) Members
Chairman Jim McGovern
(D-MA-2nd)
Ranking Member Tom Cole
(R-OK-4th)

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings
(D-FL-20th)
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA-7th)

Rep. Norma J. Torres
(D-CA-35th)
Rep. Michael Burgess
(R-TX-26th)

Rep. Ed Perlmutter
(D-CO-7th)
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ-8th)

Rep. Jamie Raskin
(D-MD-8th)

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon
(D-PA-5th)

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY-25th)

Rep. Donna Shalala
(D-FL-27th)
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier
(D-CA-11th)

You can be patched through to your U.S. Representative’s D.C. office via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Or click through at the members’ names’ above, to find their contact info. (direct D.C. office phone and fax numbers; online webform for submitting email).

Urge your U.S. Rep. to block Yucca dump funding, as the opening of the Yucca dump would lead to many thousands of Mobile Chernobyl truck, train, and barge shipments through most states, many major cities (including Washington, D.C., right past the U.S. Capitol itself — see a photo of the rail route, above right!), and 75% of U.S. congressional districts. Yucca is also: scientifically unsuitable (won’t isolate the radioactive waste from the environment, but instead will leak massively into the groundwater); non-consent-based; illegal (the Western Shoshone Indian Nation holds title to the land and water, via the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863); and an environmental injustice (the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and other Nevadans downwind have already suffered significantly from decades of nuclear weapons testing radioactive fallout).

The good news is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes restoration of Yucca dump funding. So too does House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey (D-NY), and Energy & Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). But when the full Appropriations Committee voted on this amendment last month, four Democrats defected to the pro-Yucca dump side. Although the restoration of Yucca dump funding was blocked in committee, it was by a narrow margin of 27 to 25. That’s why pro-Yucca dump IL Republican John Shimkus is trying to reintroduce his amendment, for consideration on the full House floor, in hopes of picking off enough Dems, to switch sides, so that his amendment passes as part of the Energy & Water Appropriations bill. We must stop him in the Rules Committee first, before his amendment reaches the full House floor!

Thank you for taking action directly, or spreading word to your friends and colleagues in any of the U.S. congressional districts represented above!

We must do all we can to block restoration of funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump targeted at Western Shoshone Indian land in Nevada!

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Disarmament Quotes

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

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