PROTECT THE GRAND CANYON FROM URANIUM MINING!

Re Posted info from July 28, 2011

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PROTECT THE GRAND CANYON FROM URANIUM MINING!

STOP NUCLEAR LOANS!

THE HOW AND THE WHY....

July 28, 2011

Dear Friends,

Two particularly interesting articles came through my e-mail today and I wanted to share them with you.

This one gives a short, but quite good, history of the German anti-nuclear movement which, as you know, is succeeding in its goal of moving Germany away from nuclear power and toward a clean energy future.

I particularly ask you to note this line: "In June 2011, Germany became the first industrialised nation to commit to abandoning the atom as an energy source once and for all by 2022 - a move unthinkable without the unremitting pressure of Germany’s tenacious anti-nukes movement."

A move unthinkable without the unremitting pressure of a tenacious anti-nuclear movement. That is why NIRS does what we do, why we send you these Alerts and urge you to take part. We need to be just as tenacious and unyielding as the German anti-nuclear movement has been for years. And we need to put the same kind of pressure on decisionmakers in the U.S. Sometimes it may seem we send out too many actions, or perhaps we seem repetitive--asking you to send in letters on an issue you've already acted on, to send in your umpteenth letter on nuclear loans, for example.

But that's part of being tenacious and putting on pressure. Remember that we are countering an industry with far more resources and more lobbyists that we could ever muster--the industry is meeting with Congressmembers and Administration people every day. Those people are hearing the industry's viewpoint. If they're going to hear ours--the majority of the American public's--we have to do it ourselves. We do our best to provide you with the tools and information to do so, but it only works when we all participate.

And it's also why we ask you to help us spread the word as far and wide as you can. Because our movement needs to keep growing if we're going to be as effective as we can be and need to be. We must keep growing if we're going to have the ability and resources to mount the kinds of effective public actions that many of you have been asking for. The August 7 MUSE concert will be the largest public anti-nuclear statement in the U.S. in many years (and thank you to everyone helping pull it together!), but it should be a start to bigger things, not an end in itself.

The second article is this op-ed from House Progressive Caucus Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) that appeared in yesterday'sArizona Republic.

In April, thousands of you responded to our Alert urging the Obama Administration to prevent uranium mining around our great national treasure, the Grand Canyon. And the Administration heard your comments and those of tens of thousands of others, and in June the Interior Department decided to place a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mines there. It was a great victory.

But as Rep. Grijalva warns, some House Republicans are attempting to overturn the Interior Department's decision even before its final implementation, and require the government to hand out leases for new uranium mines.

We need to protect this victory, and the Grand Canyon itself. Tell your Congressmembers here to reject any and all efforts to open up the area around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining!

Back to the nuclear loan program...Buried in our last e-mail on the MUSE concert was a note that we have updated our action page on nuclear loans and we urged you to take new action to ensure that the Senate does not attempt to put new money into this program (the House already has decided not to add money for the program, but if the Senate adds money, the House could well accept). The last thing we need in an era of unprecedented and harmful budget-cutting is more taxpayer money for more nuclear reactors.

But perhaps the note was too buried, and the response from you was low. So I ask you again to please tell the Senate: end the nuclear loan program.

I know many, many of you already have taken similar actions this year--but that's part of being tenacious, part of keeping up the pressure. It's what we have to do, it's what works.

As always, thanks for all you do. Together we will build a nuclear-free carbon-free energy future....

Michael Mariotte
Executive Director
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
nirsnet@nirs.org
www.nirs.org

Your activism and contributions make our work possible: protecting the Grand Canyon; preventing new reactor construction; seeking shutdown of dangerous existing reactors; building a nuclear-free carbon-free energy future. Please make a tax-deductible contribution here, or after you've submitted your letters.

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Re-posted by RadiationAlerts.org