BREDL as Sustainable Business in a Community Context

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The cousins whom I encounter in doing these stories literally have me weeping with joy at times: how can we go wrong, when the likes of Mike Ewall, Bobbie Paul, and Louis Zeller–whom we encounter today, as a champion of community and thereby as the best possible hope of embodying ‘sustainable business’–seem to compose just a small sample of the ‘mensch’ who characterize the human prospect?

Joe Hill, as he faced his murderers, cloaked in judicial robes that justified their lynching, said “Don’t mourn. Organize.” Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, approaching her 100th birthday as she slipped away, repeated Joe Hill’s simple advice. The power of organization, and the concomitant helplessness and ennui that is the best that the unorganized can expect, thus forms a theme of today’s output.
 

Joe Hill wrote the classic “Pie in the Sky” both to snort his outrage at a system that produced the sorts of lies and devastation that have appeared in many of the stories distributed through these forums, and to prod people to think and act about these outrageous depredations. His words cross nearly a century since the authorities murdered him “for writing songs like this.”

“Working folks of all countries unite,
side by side we for freedom shall fight.
When the world and its wealth we have gained,
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
You will eat, by and by,
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry;
chop some wood, do you good,
and you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.

The primary message that flows from the heart and mind of this extraordinary hero is twofold. The first part is about the false front that forms the surface of the mediated versions of the lives that we lead, and how this falsity hurts our prospects of becoming fully human. In other words, the ‘bye and bye’ is a lie.

The second portion, on display above, concerns the aforementioned need for powerful ways of relating to each other. Lacking such ‘organization,’ personal responsibility evaporates because collective potency is impossible. Of all the contentions that have flowed through these essays, none has a greater significance than does this one.

At the same time, many of the other themes that activate the stories I’ve written show up again in today’s posting. The insidious cult of secrecy, the foolish compartmentalization of understanding, the dismissal of community knowledge, and more emerge in the lines that follow.

And once again, this time in the form of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, we have the good fortune to observe empowering community engagement that can serve as a model for all of us. That sense of design, of a template from which we can do ‘business better’ and achieve renewable energy, and so on, as folks may recall, is also thematic in this ongoing work.
 

INTRODUCTION

When I found out that Lou Zeller and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) had both originated near Madison County, North Carolina, where my wife and I married in a homey ceremony, part old hippie and part Latin funk, I figured that ‘it’s a small world’ would end up being part of this story. That region of the world is as close to heaven as I’ve ever seen on earth–verdant rain forests, tumbling waterfalls, vistas as vivid as the seven wonders rolled into one.

Little did I think that the origins of BREDL, which were in relation to a bizarre plan “wired from the inside,” according to Zeller, to create a high-level nuclear waste repository, would lead to the site of our wedding, practically on top of all of the geologic volatility implicit in a place name like ‘Hot Springs Nor was this the end to the sense of congruence.

The initial ‘waste-inside-the-fault-lines’ plan, “shelved but not killed,” according to the testimony of Mary Olson, has returned to life, like a long dormant attack-vampire. Olson, a principle in the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), has for decades stood up to the proponents of things nuclear. 

 

Her passionate opposition to atomic technology emanates from apersonal nightmare of radiation poisoning that nearly did her in. She had to cope with fear of dismissal from her job when she protested her exposure, and lies and cover-up thicker than the steel that ‘protects’ us from the toxic cores of reactors typified the authorities’ response to her confrontation with a dual inherency: those of radiation’s lethal potential and of humanity’s careless sloppiness.

In case JustMeans readers don’t recall, the official response to Mary’s personal tragedy is a theme–lies and cover ups– that characterizes the entire administrative structure of nuclear matters, whether corporate or governmental. And, as if they’ve learned nothing, as if the promoters of fission-to-boil-tea have not listened to anything other than the overarching imperative of capital to find a place to park its cash, some of the same folks whom we’ve met in the course of other nuclear monstrosities want to come back to Madison County, now that Yucca Mountain appears as dead as a door nail.

We can listen to Brent Scowcroft, he who acknowledged that despite all of the careful planning, ‘we’ might ‘have gotten it wrong about Depleted Uranium,’ extol, as Chairman of the Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) on America’s Nuclear Future, the again ‘well-studied’ virtues of burying a hundred-million-year witches brew beneath the people of Western North Carolina or some other hapless community. But, once more, that is not all.

We will learn that, so far as the government of the world’s greatest democracy is concerned, the future of nukes is a fait acompli, no more resistable than is the coming of the equinox in a week or so. And I have to note, before continuing in this chronicle of a courageous community organization and the magnificent folk who toil under its auspices, that this is yet another verse of Joe HIll’s “Pie in the Sky,” about which the martyr’s final refrain was memorable: “That’s a lie!”
 

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

The story that Lou recounts about twenty six years ago, were the coming of a glowing future full of nukes irresistible, would never grace these pages. Its presence here, above all else, is a testament to the simple statement: “The people, united, will never be defeated.”

In 1984, Lou Zeller and his wife, with “small kids at home,” were committed proponents of peace and disarmament, right in the center of the Appalachian massif. They had “been doing peace and environment work, with this newsletter we put out and all, for years and years,” all of this on a volunteer basis, when they discovered, “out of nowhere really,” that the Department of Energy was eyeing the area along the French Broad River as a repository for high level radioactive waste.

Under the purview of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, DOE had narrowed its search for a place to implant nuclear poison to “12 areas in the Eastern United States,” according to Zeller, as plausible recipients of this glowing gift. Needless to say, none of the localities chosen ‘jumped for joy’ at this news. In fact, a preliminary Madison County (Population in 1980 under 20,000) meeting that Lou and Janet Zeller helped to organize drew 300 people to a crowded little hall where the air of disgust against the potential present from Ronald Reagan and Congress was universal.

All over the Eastern U.S., the responses were similar. A key law suit( www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/lwsch/journals/bcealr/28_1/05_TXT.htm) in the aftermath of NWPA, the so-called “Northern States Power” action, dovetailed with the Minnesota’s legislature’s rejecting high level waste out of hand, “without express authorization.” 

This case continues to be among the most cited of Federal judicial decisions, and a treasure trove of documents, completely indexed, awaits the intrepid researcher who can find the resources to delve this matter. As things stand, the powers-that-be–both corporate and governmental, once again are preparing to designate some slice of the nation as a “sacrifice zone.”
The original decision to split the burden of ‘disposing’ of lethal materials that would remain noxious for thousands of years or more, according to Minnesota’s archivists, “was a compromise between Western and Eastern states. While not explicitly ordering it, the Act called for construction of two underground nuclear waste repositories, one to open in the West in 1990 and one in the East several years later.”

“The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),” this overview from Minnesota continues, “conducted studies in crystalline rock formations in 17 states for a possible location for the second repository,” in relation to which Madison County, along with Janet and Lou and their children, and the three hundred folks who met in 1986, ‘made the cut’ as a finalist.

To say the least nervous at the prospects of these wastes percolating a mile or two below the surface of where their youngsters played and went to school, “We had speakers to come to the group that was launching,” and “it caught BREDL’s attention,” the NGO having been in existence in the area for just a year or so at that point.

Lou pondered, a wry tone noticeable even over the phone, “Had they done homework at DOE? After all, they missed Hot Springs, which should have stuck out like a big sore thumb,” suggesting a geology highly suspect in terms of lodging a hot and nasty solidified sludge of radioactive putrefaction “underneath our homes,” as well, I would have added, as below some of the most beautiful and ecologically significant land that our fair orb offers to life.

Though he cannot prove his hunch, Lou is certain that “the political layers of DOE’s work were important.” He suspects, but cannot prove that “investigations about oil and gas drilling might have had something to do” with Madison County’s being chosen. The “pre-selection showed evidence of tipping choices like in a pork-barrel way,” with North Carolina also in the running for a low level dump during those years. 

“The two campaigns,” one against the high-level waste in the Mountains and the other for lower level trash on the coastal plain, “sort of dovetailed into each other.” As matters transpired, North Carolina was one of the final two locales for the low level garbage. In sum, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of citizens turned out, turned up, and turned on the heat against these deadly support systems for the nuclear power industry.

This notion of how critical waste handling is to the power industry is crucial to understand, and will be an aspect of the next article on this topic. Briefly, however, readers need to see that keeping large volumes of highly irradiated materials, full of horrible toxins, at nuclear reactor sites scattered around the nation, aggregating after each refueling in higher and higher amounts, was not only environmentally risky–and potentially a massive public health danger for millions of people, but expensive for the utilities that had to oversee the stuff.

One legal commentator stated simply that “Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (i)n response to the accumulation of spent nuclear fuel at commercial reactors,” proceeding to notethat “Nuclear waste has long been the Achilles’ heel of the civilian nuclear power industry. The spent nuclear fuel that reactors generate remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years; however, all the spent fuel that has been generated to date is stored in temporary, short-term facilities. As the federal government struggles to develop a permanent solution, many temporary storage facilities are nearing capacity. A few states in which civilian reactors are located have placed severe constraints on the construction of additional needed storage, potentially causing the shutdown of the federally-licensed reactors. In part because of this pressure from the states, Congress has sought to create a federal, centralized interim storage facility while development of a permanent repository proceeds. This controversial effort has yet to succeed.”

These ‘severe constraints’ have been escalating since the 1980′s, as deadline after deadline for finding a ‘permanent solution’ to a million-year problem came and went without any ‘final solution’ proving acceptable. Back in the 1980′s(www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/planng06.xml), “In May of 1986, the DOE announced it was going to suspend the search for the second repository, largely because it was felt that the Western site could handle all of the nation’s nuclear waste through the year 2020. Western states cried foul and claimed the decision was meant to help Republican political candidates back East.”

Robert Alvarez, a venerable policy analyst who has specialized in such issues, today came as close to ‘reading the riot act’ about the matter as his ilk will ever do. In his article, “Advice for the Blue Ribbon Commission,” he notes about what happened in Madison County and elsewhere a quarter century ago, “This process was scrapped … due to eastern states derailing the selection process. At that time Congress voted to make Yucca Mountain the only site to be considered. Yet Yucca’s proposed opening date slipped by more than 20 years as the project encountered major technical hurdles and fierce local and state opposition.”

Lou Zeller is not a policy wonk. He is a self-taught citizen’s science advocate who has fought for democracy, social and environmental justice, and simple ecological wisdom for that same quarter century that Alvarez mentions and more. We should listen to what he says about that now long-ago process.
 

“It was the obverse of success in Madison County, with state and national issues boiling, hearings in Ashevillle, ’88 hearings in Congress that dumped all 12 sites in the East–basically a national outcry about the whole process led to a changed law, with them saying ‘Oh, we had less waste than anticipated, so we only need West.’ That’s a lie: it was just a fig leaf to get out of hot water. The ‘Screw-Nevada Bill’ was the nickname” of that legislation. And now, despite the mulish resistance of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Yucca Mountain is toast. Hence, earlier this year, Barack Obama, exactly the friend to the nuclear industry that I’ve been calling him since January 2008, appointed aBlue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. We’ll be considering the implications of that name momentarily, and examining this political love-fest between high-level politicians and the nuclear establishment more thoroughly in coming articles.

But in 2010, in Madison County, folks are singing “We Won’t Get Fooled Again,” by the Who. As arecent article pointed out, front-loading the issue for local consideration, 
 

“The rumors have been circulating since early spring (that) the Department of Energy is once again considering a nuclear waste repository in Sandy Mush. Those who lived here in the 1980s remember well the groundswell of opposition that arose when the federal government seriously considered burying much of the nation’s nuclear waste about 14 miles from downtown Marshall. The governor, house representatives, and even the late Sen. Jesse Helms railed against the plan. Local residents met with Vice President George Bush to argue against putting the dump here. On April 4, 1986, a public hearing regarding the proposed nuclear waste dump lasted nine hours, so many people in Sandy Mush and across the region opposed the dump. …According to reports from the time, the Department of Energy thought a 10,000-foot thick layer of granite beneath Sandy Mush might be just what was needed for the long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel. But opponents argued that the rock was broken and faulty, and that ground water could cause the metal cases holding the waste to corrode.”

A policy article that reads like a public relations primer for the governmental/industrial agenda’s advocatesputs the matter in silky terms. “Nuclear waste policy in the United States has failed in large part because of public and state opposition to repository siting. However, that outcome was not inevitable. This paper argues that better policy design and greater attention to the crucial tasks of policy legitimation… .may increase the probability of success.”

Lou Zeller would shake his head at the sophisticated spin. “The impact on communities and the environment are just huge, and public health is even a bigger issue.” He recalls a founding member of BREDL. “Bernard Goss was on the original board… . (and since he) worked for an Electric Membership Co-op, (he had a fair amount of technical knowledge). HIs vision was to avoid victimization, a kind of repeat performance where the politically weaker get hurt repeatedly. You know, the sh** rolls downhill. He had this vision of environmental justice as a strategic piece of community self-defense.”

Twenty-five years later, while he deplores that the man that North Carolina helped to put into the White House has turned into a ‘wolf-in-sheep’s clothing,’ he is ready to join the struggle again. “The price of liberty,” or more truly the price of democracy, “is eternal vigilance.”

Post continues: www.justmeans.com/BREDL-as-Sustainable-Business-in-a-Community-Context/31139.html