Скачать или смотреть Sister Megan Rice at A15 Hanford Rally

Sister Megan Rice at A15 Hanford Rally

Many THANKS to Squadron13's supporters in Eugene and elsewhere for making these videos possible!

OCCUPY PORTLAND PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Beth Rakoncay
Phone: (971)258-1627
Email: [email protected]

Website: http://hanfordrally.wordpress.com/han...

Hanford: North America's Fukushima
A15
Occupy Portland Speaks Out on an Environmental Tragedy

Mass action planned for April 15
Just 177 miles upstream from composting, bike-riding, green-belting Portland, Oregon, is the largest concentration of nuclear waste in the country. Built on the banks of the Columbia River in Eastern Washington, Hanford's reactors have produced enough plutonium to arm much of the America's nuclear arsenal, including the bomb that devastated Nagasaki in 1945.

Facts:
The Hanford site stores more than 56 million gallons of high level radioactive waste, as well as housing an active nuclear power plant.

There is mass tort lawsuit pending against the federal government, brought by nearly two thousand plaintiffs whose health has been damaged by Hanford radiation. Two plaintiffs have already been awarded settlements.

Storage tanks are believed to have been leaking as early as 1945 -- The first confirmed leak was in 1956. The largest confirmed leak was in 1973 when 115,000 gallons of radioactive material leaked into the surrounding area. The total amount of waste that has now leaked from the underground tanks is believed to be 10 times this amount.

This is about human responsibility in the face of an epic environmental tragedy which has occurred and which will only get worse without us taking a stand. --Occupy Portland

"Contamination has reached groundwater and the nearby Columbia River." Oregon Department of Energy

"The waste that's in the tanks poses a significant environmental and human health risk for thousands of years to come." Suzanne Dahl, Washington Department of Ecology

"Hanford is a prime example of the unmet promises across America to permanently relocate and secure nuclear waste," Congressman John Shimkus (Republican, IL), chairman of the Environment and the Economy Subcommittee after a visit to Hanford in 2011

We are speaking out directly against the failure of the cleanup at Hanford--Occupy Portland

Hanford was established in 1943, an extension of the Manhattan Project. Its construction displaced local European settlers and Native tribes (including the Umatilla, Yakama, Wanapum and Nez Perce) who had hunted fished, lived and worshipped on this land at the confluence of the Snake, Yakama and Columbia Rivers for generations.

Clean-up at the site, as laid out in a document called the Tri-Party Agreement in 1989, has encountered consistent setbacks, resulting in missed deadlines and shifting milestones. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy — a signatory on the Agreement — was still dumping barrels of waste in unlined pits on the site until the late 90?s.

Occupy Portland raises the question: is enough being done to clean up the most contaminated site in America?
A15 is a massive, nationally supported rally on April 15 to raise awareness about issues facing the Hanford Nuclear Facility. The Hanford site is an environmental disaster with the potential of becoming a catastrophe as large in scope as that of the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan.

WHY:
Because we must speak out against the failure and corruption of this clean-up as it stands today.--Occupy Portland
Current U.S. Geological Survey research indicates that a major fault line in Washington extends as far east as Pasco, making Hanford a high earthquake risk zone. And while the nine weapons-production reactors were decommissioned by the end of the 1980s, a commercial energy reactor and millions of gallons of radioactive materials remain on-site.

San Francisco-based Bechtel is one of the primary contractors charged with constructing a vitrification plant that would encase high-level waste in glass, thereby reducing the risk of further contamination. Yet, the initial 2009 deadline for the plant's construction has been pushed back to 2017, and the budget for the project has ballooned from $4.3 billion to $11.3 billion. Bechtel's past projects include Bolivia's water privatization debacle and Boston's Big Dig. Occupy Portland asks directly, Where has all the money gone??

"We are not in the construction and engineering business. We are in the business of making money." -- Steve Bechtel Sr., former company president

We express great concern for the safety of the workers inside and for the Native Americans whose way of life has been decimated by Hanford's existence. --Occupy Portland