Environmental racism: the US nuclear industry and Native Americans.(Editorial)

For decades, the United States has mined Native American lands for uranium and has tested nuclear weapons on them. Some 75 per cent of the country's uranium reserves lie under native lands - lands once considered so worthless that the authorities did not mind designating them as reservations - while all nuclear testing within the United States has been carried out on native lands. Children now play on radioactive waste from the mines simply left where it was piled up. Some of the waste has been used to build houses or schools. In many mining areas, the death rate among children is higher than among the miners. In New Mexico, Arizona and South Dakota, radiation from uranium mining tailings has contaminated water resources. The Shoshone have fought for decades to end nuclear testing on their land in the Nevada desert which has exposed them to levels of radiation many times higher than that generated by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

Now the authorities want to dump nuclear waste on native lands as well. Two proposals are …