Connecting our members and the greater community is integral to the work of the Alliance. We have a few big events in the next couple of months where you can join fellow supporters of a nuclear free, clean energy future!
September 22, 12-1 pm: Peace Walk to Protect Idaho from Nuclear Waste & Delivery of Petition Signatures
The Idaho Peace Coalition takes actions that offer everyone the opportunity to practice nonviolence together and create a culture of peace. As part of their collaborative work, they have invited the Snake River Alliance to co-host a Walk to Protect Idaho From Nuclear Waste on Tuesday, September 22, from 12 to 1pm. We will meet at the Post Office on 8th and Bannock in downtown Boise at 12, talk a walk to the Anne Frank Memorial, and end up at the Capitol where we will deliver the petition signatures showing our opposition to imports of commercial spent nuclear fuel. If you haven’t signed the online petition, you can do so here.
October 22, 9am–4pm: Tour of the Idaho National Laboratory
Alliance Site tours are excellent opportunities to get a real sense of what has happened and is happening at the Idaho National Lab. Everyone can join us! This year we’re again welcoming visual artists on the tour who can go home and communicate to others what they see and learn. Here’s a snapshot of what we’ll see first-hand.
- Two hulking nuclear-powered airplane engines. For obvious reasons, they never operated in the sky, but unshielded, ground-level experiments between 1955 and 1961 left a fair amount of contamination here in Idaho.
- Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project. The work at AMWTP is to sort, compact, and package low-level and plutonium-contaminated waste to ship off-site. Two accidents last year have closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant indefinitely, so plutonium-contaminated waste is treated and then put back in storage.
- Radioactive Waste Management Complex, where plutonium from weapons production was buried above the Snake River Aquifer and is now being exhumed.
- Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center, where there is some of the most radioactive waste on earth. Spent nuclear fuel is stored underwater and in dry casks there. High-level waste was produced when spent fuel was dissolved in acid so highly enriched uranium could be removed. It’s stored there in a dried form in giant bins. We’ll see the facility that, it is hoped, will finish drying the rest of the liquid high-level waste that’s now in buried tanks.
The tour will run from 9 am to about 4 pm. It will be a long, challenging day, filled with juxtapositions. You will be close to but protected from very dangerous material. The Arco Desert, at the base of the Lemhi and Lost River ranges, is one of the most beautiful parts of our state. Humans have lived there for well over 10,000 years. Beneath it, sixty years of nuclear contamination threatens the sole source of drinking water for 300,000 Idahoans downstream. Hazards have been created and accumulated and are now being cleaned up. Come see it for yourself.
If you have questions or already know you would like to go on the tour, please contact our nuclear program director, Beatrice Brailsford, at [email protected].
October 23-24: Idaho’s Climate Action Community Presents Celebrations, Workshops & the Rally for Climate Action!
We are so excited to be a part of this collaboration between numerous groups working for climate action! On Friday October 23 from 6-9pm, we’ll have music, food trucks, booths and presentations at Fort Boise. On Saturday October 24, we’ll be back at Fort Boise for a 1030am “Move Awake” dance and yoga workshop followed by a pre-rally celebration and sign-making party from 12-2. The Rally for Climate Action starts at 2pm at the Capitol! Then we’ll head back to Fort Boise for a post-rally party and discussion of next steps from 3-6 pm. More information coming soon, so please save the date and tell ALL of your friends! Click here if you would like to make a donation to support this awesome collaborative event!