Since the advent of the nuclear era, Native peoples have suffered disproportionately more than other populations from this technology. Our peoples and territories have been contaminated with radiation from uranium mining, milling, atomic testing and in isolated communities like Point Hope, Alaska, we have served as guinea pigs for the federal government in its radiation experiments. Now our lands serve as potential sites for radioactive waste dumps.

After fifty years of scientific study and the largest federal investment in any single energy source, the nuclear industry has a uniform way to solve the problem of nuclear waste--load it up on some trucks and trains, drive it down a dirt road and unload it on an Indian community.

The federal government and nuclear industry have targeted Native lands for waste storage for more than a decade. For them, the problem has been a political one – who will take society's most deadly garbage? The material impoverishment and geographic isolation of reservation communities seemed like the answer. They were wrong. More than thirteen tribes have defeated nuclear waste dumps on their land in the past ten years. But the industry won't take NO for an answer!

Today, the nuclear industry is escalating its efforts with a huge push to create a "temporary" dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land. At the same time, a national consortium of eleven utilities has stepped forward and is negotiating with the small band of Skull Valley Goshutes in Utah to secure a private dump.

Leading the fight for Nuclear waste storage on Indian land is Minnesota's own Xcel Energy, formerly Northern States Power Company.

Like an asabakeshiinh, a spider, Xcel Energy, formerly Northern States Power Company, is a corporation which weaves together communities thousands of miles apart into a intricate web of devastation tangled with dams, nuclear power plants, transmission lines and waste dumps. Xcel Energy supplies power to twelve states. On one hand, this is a geographic miracle, but on the other, it demonstrates a serious shortcoming in U.S. energy policy and centralized power. There are 104 operating nuclear power plants in the U.S. today; three of them belong to Xcel Energy.

Pushed against a wall, with no nuclear waste fairy on the horizon to take its waste away, Xcel Energy began an aggressive push for passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The Act would pass liability for the waste-- produced at a profit by the utility -- to American tax payers and would transfer waste from nuclear power plants, like Prairie Island, onto America's highways and rail ways to its final resting place, Yucca Mountain, Nevada or Western Shoshone land. Yucca Mountain is the only site under study for a permanent federal waste repository, despite the fact that the mountain is a sacred site within Newe Sogobia, sovereign land of the Western Shoshone as guaranteed by treaty. Xcel Energy has been a leader in the movement to secure passage of the law and has joined with a number of utilities in focusing campaign contributions on pivotal Congressmen.

Because the Yucca Mountain repository is under heated debate, Xcel Energy began shopping around to find new locations to store their nuclear waste casks off-site. So they set up a new limited liability corporation, called Private Fuel Storage (PFS), with a group of ten additional utilities to package a private deal for the waste. Xcel Energy and the other utilities were then able to drop their waste just outside Salt Lake City, Utah on the Skull Valley Goshutes. Not content with only passing on the liability of their nuclear waste to a private shell corporation, Xcel Energy has recently gone a step further. They have passed on all responsibility of their nuclear facilities to Nuclear Management Corporation, a new limited liability corporation with very few assets (except two aging nuclear power plants and a few employees) that now has full responsibility for Xcel Energy's plants.

Honor the Earth believes the Western Shoshone and the Skull Valley Goshutes need solar generated power not nuclear waste on their land.