[CPEO-MEF] Urgent! Sign-on request from our Russian enviro colleagues

[marylia@earthlink.net]

URGENT!  ACTION ALERT!  YOUR ORGANIZATION'S SIGN ON IS REQUESTED BY OUR
RUSSIAN ENVIRONMENTAL COLLEAGUES.  READ ON ...

The following is an alert from Tri-Valley CAREs' upcoming March 2001
newsletter. It is time- critical. Please read and respond immediately.
Thank you. --Marylia Kelley

On Dec. 21, 2000, the Russian Duma, the lower house of parliament, gave
preliminary approval for an amendment to the Environmental Protection Law
lifting the ban on importing spent nuclear fuel.

"They have dollar signs in their eyes,"  said Natalia Mironova, a leader in
the broad-based environmental movement that gathered two and one-half
million signatures in Russia to oppose the importation of foreign nuclear
waste.

Moreover, Tri-Valley CAREs recently learned from a Livermore Lab report
that the U.S. may propose sending its "U.S. origin" irradiated nuclear fuel
from 8 nuclear  reactors in Taiwan to the Russian site at Krasnoyarsk in
Siberia, if the change in Russian law goes through.

"The U.S. Dept. of Energy and the American nuclear industry are looking to
set up a radioactive waste toilet in Russia," charged Vladimir Sliviak,
co-chair of Ecodefense.

Our good friend Natalia Mironova and her colleagues in the Movement for
Nuclear Safety in Chelyabinsk, Russia have requested that we circulate a
statement they have drafted in opposition to the new law.

An excerpt from that statement says: "It is unethical to take advantage of
a country's socio-economic crisis by offering profits in exchange for
storing materials that present serious dangers to that nation's population.
Each country must take responsibility for its own waste products."

Please help us help the Russian environmentalists! Contact us immediately
if you belong to a group that can sign on to this statement. (If you need a
copy of the complete statement, just call, fax or email us and we will send
it.)

We need your sign-on no later than March 14, so we have time to distribute
the statement to the Russian Duma before the final vote on March 22.

NOTE: We are in the process of re-formatting the statement (the all too
usual cyberspace formatting problems). We will circulate the full statement
via email tomorrow. We wanted to give you this "heads up" so you can begin
whatever the sign on process is for your group. To sign on, email, phone or
fax Tri-Valley CAREs. We need your name, title, if applicable and group
name and address. Our Russian colleagues have told us that sign ons from
groups from France and the U.K. will be looked at with suspicion and
discounted by the Russian Duma (as in "those countries just don't want the
competition for the [reprocessing] dollars.") All groups from ALL other
countries are encouraged to sign on. Thanks. --mk

Marylia Kelley
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
2582 Old First Street
Livermore, CA USA 94550

<http://www.igc.org/tvc/> - is our web site, please visit us there!

(925) 443-7148 - is our phone
(925) 443-0177 - is our fax

Working for peace, justice and a healthy environment since 1983, Tri-Valley
CAREs has been a member of the nation-wide Alliance for Nuclear
Accountability in the U.S. since 1989, and is a co-founding member of the
Abolition 2000 global network for the elimination of nuclear weapons, the
U.S. Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Back From the Brink
campaign to get nuclear weapons taken off hair-trigger alert.



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