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Nuclear Showdown

In Mojave Land

Loving the openness of a live desert
Blue sky, not so distant mountain
Feeling the honesty of afternoon breezes blowing
Whichever way they please.

There's a little poetry reading going on in the Mojave. Josh Morrissey tells his fellow campers to come outside the tent, into the sunlight, so he can read them a poem he found amid a stack of old newspapers. He stands with his back to the sun and the mountains, facing the desert site of a proposed nuclear waste dump, his hair blowing wildly around his head.

Morrissey, 47, is one of three men living on this piece of federal land in the Mojave desert. He has been here in Ward Valley, surrounded by sacred mountain ranges, creosote bush and cholla cactus for almost four months. With him is Chris Monroe, 35, and Nick Bailey, 38, fellow environmentalists who are dedicated, or just plain crazy, enough to spend months in an isolated patch of the Mojave desert.

Ward Valley, sacred to the Native Americans of the area, lies 18 miles west of the Colorado River and 22 miles southwest of Needles, Calif. Activists from the more than 200 environmental, Native American and anti-nuclear organizations that comprise the Save Ward Valley Coalition are protesting the building of what could be the first nuclear waste dump site in California.

The occupation of the site started out as a weekend gathering for all who wanted to show their opposition to the proposed dump. Few people could handle the isolation, the lack of water or the fact that there isn't a lot to do except wait for the sunset-and the bulldozers.

Prior to Feb. 15, Morrissey and his fellow campers could have been forced off this land at any minute. U.S. Ecology, the corporation licensed to build the dump, could have began bulldozing as soon as the Department of the Interior transferred Ward Valley to the state of California. But to the relief of the Save Ward Valley Coalition, the feds announced that the impending transfer of the land would be postponed until further tests on the environmental impact of the dump could be completed.

"You have to do what's right sometime in your life, otherwise you lose who you are. Who you are is what you stand for," says Morrissey, a self-described radical who has lived outside of "the system" since he was struck by flower power in the late '60s.

"I came out here because of the earth. That's the biggest part of my life. That's always been a good enough reason," Morrissey says. "I know this earth can't take a bulldozer and a shovel out of the hands of those people. Somebody else has to come do it for it."

To those who don't appreciate the beauty of a vast desert stretching as far as the eye can see, Ward Valley looks like a sensible place to dispose of nuclear waste. But for the activists who have spent months, even years, of their lives trying to save this valley, dumping nuclear waste here is a crime against nature.

The men at the encampment have a role in this campaign that other activists don't have the time or constitution to play: they are here, on the site, in the desert, all the time. By living on this piece of federal land they have attracted the press and have let proponents of the dump know that they think it is wrong to put nuclear waste into the earth.

Morrissey, despite the fact that he has lived mostly outdoors and on the road for the past 25 years, looks much younger than his 47 years. The former high school track star received a scholarship to Boston University, met some Marxists, dropped some acid and realized he would never return to mainstream society.

"I'm like one of the rare people you'll ever meet who did nothing with his life within the system," he says. Morrissey talks about the '60s a lot. He will also talk at length about his philosophy of activism and his reasons for being in Ward Valley. His words come out fast but there is a hint of boredom in his tone. He doesn't claim to be an environmental martyr, "I'm just a simple person," he says. "I go to things."

Here, in the Mojave, Morrissey goes on long runs, not keeping track of time or distance, but maybe composing another poem about this place in the desert.

What the World Could Be

Pure optimism and

Lofty idealism

Reach into the sky

The proposed dump site is close to the Mojave National Preserve and eight Bureau of Land Management Wilderness Areas. The valley has also been designated by the U.S. Department of the Interior as a critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise.

Last year scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey warned the Department of the Interior that nuclear wastes buried at Ward Valley might leak into the ground water and the Colorado River, the biggest water supplier of Southern California and parts of Arizona and Mexico.

Although a National Academy of Sciences panel has reported it is "highly unlikely" that radioactive wastes would contaminate the Colorado River, U.S. Ecology, formerly known as Nuclear Engineering Co., has a history of problem dumps. For instance, last year a report by the U.S. Geological Survey disclosed that U.S. Ecology's facility in Beatty, Nev., has been leaking radioactive waste into the ground water.

"Scientific studies show that comparing the Beatty dump to the Ward Valley dump is an apples and oranges comparison," says Frank Nagle of Hill & Knowlton, the public relations firm representing U.S. Ecology. The standards set when the Beatty dump was built, 30 years ago, are different than the standards of today, which U.S. Ecology will follow when building the facility in Ward Valley.

Further testing on the site is just another thorn in the side of U.S. Ecology and the state of California, which have been fighting this battle for about eight years.

"The decision made by the Department of the Interior is ludicrous," says Jeff Raleigh, also of Hill & Knowlton. "Activists are directly responsible for the fact that low-level radioactive wastes are stored in 2,000 locations throughout the state instead of one."

Currently, says Raleigh, low-level wastes are stored in the hospitals and universities that produce them. Gov. Pete Wilson and U.S. Ecology wants a place to put this waste before the hospitals and universities run out of room. Ward Valley, says Raleigh, is as good a place as any for a dump. "There is no other spot," he says.

Although U.S. Ecology emphasizes that the planned facility is needed for disposal of academic laboratory and hospital waste, statistics from the Department of Energy say 80 percent of the waste stored there will actually come from commercial nuclear power reactors and less than one percent from medical and industrial sources.

Morrissey recalls a public relations move staged by U.S. Ecology at the dump site. The company brought cancer patients and doctors to the site to shoot a video. The premise was that these cancer patients would not be alive today if they had not received radioactive therapy, the waste products of which would be dumped into Ward Valley. The doctors at the event said they needed a place to dump waste so they could continue treating people with cancer. Morrissey asked which group members, specifically, had cancer and found that only a few actually did.

"It was real tacky," Morrissey says. "The guy who was the chief spokesman who did have cancer said he wouldn't be alive or anything (without the radioactive treatments) and had a Pete Wilson bumper sticker on his car."

Some members of the Save Ward Valley Coalition see the decision by the Department of the Interior as a way of getting scientific results that will shut the environmentalists up and get the project completed once and for all. Others see it as another year to round up opposition to the dump.

"We need the camp now more than ever," says Tori Woodard, an activist who has been involved in the campaign since 1992. Woodard says now that testing could delay building for up to a year, people need to be reminded that this is still an issue to think about.

Morrissey and the rest of the activists in the Save Ward Valley Coalition know they are up against strong forces. Yet they are willing to live in Needles or at the encampment, organizing the locals, informing the public, devoting their lives right now to this issue. And what will come of it? Maybe nothing, Morrissey says, but the point is, they tried.

"That's how you have to do things these days," he says. "You don't come to this desert because you think this will be the camp that will turn around the nuclear disposal industry. You come here basically because you think it's wrong. And that way it's unconditional, you never lose... people don't understand because it's a society based on results."

Woodard agrees. "It's a symbolic camp, so it has been effective," she says. "One person can make a big difference out here."

"I'm here because of principle," says Monroe, a quiet man whose form of environmentalism used to be going into empty lots by himself and cleaning up the garbage strewn there. "This is kinda a first for me. I figured this was important enough to get involved."

Raleigh calls the encampment a "minor irritant" and claims the people who are camping illegally are disturbing the environment more than a nuclear waste dump will. U.S. Ecology, he says, plans on having people walk in front of their bulldozers to keep an eye out for the desert tortoises.

"They may think this camp is a joke," Morrissey says, "but they know that for the people who were willing to spend their lives here, that it wasn't. And in the back of their mind, they'll know that there is something wrong with what they are doing."

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