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All is not quiet on the western front. For the Western Shoshone, an indigenous nation with an unceded Treaty covering a large swath of 60 million acres of ancestral territory stretching across Nevada, California, Idaho and Utah, their traditional homeland is better described as a war zone. Not only has the US government used Shoshone lands to test hundreds of nuclear weapons, dispose of thousands of metric tonnes of radioactive waste, and proposed Yucca Mountain as a national dumpsite for (even more) deadly nuclear waste; modern corporate gold mining, including many Canadian operations, now threatens to gouge the heart right out of Western Shoshone territory.

Following Nevada's lead, Clark County and a nonprofit Timbisha Shoshone corporation filed petitions Monday challenging the Department of Energy's license application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. "In a nutshell, we're challenging DOE's capacity to construct and operate a safe repository," said Irene Navis, Clark County's nuclear waste planning manager. The county submitted 15 contentions to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, she said. All but three deal with safety issues related to DOE's performance assessment of the planned repository and the validity of computer models for the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Joe Egan's dying wish was granted over the weekend, when the ashes of the attorney who led Nevada's fight against nuclear waste were scattered at Yucca Mountain. A group of 18 family members, friends and work associates hiked a quarter mile up the base of the mountain's west side on Saturday and held a short ceremony officiated by an elder of the Western Shoshone Nation, several participants said. Egan died in May at age 53 from gastro-esophageal cancer. He was Nevada's lead attorney in lawsuits seeking to halt the nuclear waste repository the Department of Energy proposes to build at the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Vermont Yankee's advertisements would have us believe that nuclear power is clean, safe and reliable. This is psychological abuse on the part of Entergy towards the good people of Vermont. This week, throughout the state, I had the opportunity to listen to two speakers who have dedicated themselves to exposing the truth that we don't hear in our dialogues, debates and discussions about the future of Vermont Yankee. Lorraine Rekmans, a member of the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario and candidate for parliament, and Ian Zabarte, the secretary of state for the Western Shoshone Nation near Yucca Mountain, spoke about the missing pieces in Entergy's clean energy campaign. These missing pieces are uranium mining, waste storage and current nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada test site.

BRATTLEBORO - The recent spate of advertisements promoting the electric power generated at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as "clean and green" doesn't tell the true story, said two Native Americans whose native lands are severely affected by the nuclear power industry. Lorraine Rekmans, of the Northern Ojibwa people from Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Ian Zabarte, from Mercury, Nev., secretary of state of the Western Shoshone National Council, spoke in Brattleboro Monday night, their last stop in a weeklong visit to Vermont organized by the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance and Citizens Awareness Network.

A panel of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has recognized councils of the Shoshone and Paiutes as having standing for the purpose of being a party to the Yucca Mountain case. The NRC's Atomic Safety Licensing Board Panel Construction Authorization Board found that Native Americans will be directly affected by the proposed waste dump for high level wastes and are therefore entitled to be parties to the case. The tribes have been opposed to the dump on grounds that it would be built on Native American lands. The Board found this a "viable" claim that the tribes can argue in the case.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 4-0 today to uphold the decisions of three Construction Authorization Boards (CABs) conducting a hearing on the Department of Energy's application to build and operate a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Commission's decision includes several rulings, including a rejection of most of the NRC staff's appeal of several admitted contentions, or arguments, as well as the rejection of two Nevada contentions challenging DOE's managerial competence and institutional integrity. DOE submitted its application June 3, 2008; on Sept. 9, 2008, the NRC staff determined that the 8,600-page application contained sufficient technical information for the agency to docket it and initiate its comprehensive safety review. The NRC announced an opportunity to participate in a hearing in October 2008, and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel created three CABs to examine the 317 contentions filed by 12 petitioners, including the states of Nevada and California, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and other parties. The Yucca Mountain application, minus some classified portions, is available on the NRC Web site at this address: http://www.nrc.gov/waste/hlw-disposal/yucca-lic-app.html.