Memphis, Tenn.-- Outrage has been spreading here since we learned that radioactive waste is being buried in two local landfills. These are ordinary landfills with no special monitoring or regulation for radioactive material. This came out in a report from Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) titled, "Out of Control--On Purpose: DOE's Dispersal of Radioactive Waste into Landfills and Consumer Products."

It turns out that a company called RACE is licensed to send radioactive materials to the North Shelby BFI Landfill in neighboring Millington, Tenn. This is the same company that wanted to put a radioactive waste incinerator on Presidents Island near Black communities in Memphis, but an outpouring of Black and white people stopped them. (See Community opposes nuclear waste incinerator, May-June 2005 N&L). They assured us at the time that all their waste was handled carefully and disposed of properly, but we had reports of trucks from RACE dumping at North Shelby at night, when it was closed.

The NIRS report tells of how materials contaminated with radioactivity are being released to ordinary landfills or even recycled, without serious monitoring, and how the nuclear establishment has been pushing to do this on a large scale for decades to cut their costs of dealing with nuclear waste. These efforts were fought off by anti-nuclear groups, workers, state and local governments, and even industries that didn't want these materials dumped on them. Tennessee is a center of unloading nuclear waste, making it someone else's problem--ours. We suspect our state is on its way to becoming the country's nuclear dump--some is already coming from as far as California. This reflects how impossible the problem of dealing with nuclear waste is--what's needed is to stop producing it.

Already in Middle Tennessee, Citizens to End Nuclear Dumping in Tennessee (ENDIT) has been organized to demand "a permanent end to dumping all nuclear and toxic waste in our landfills in Tennessee or other sites in Tennessee" and "frequent and thorough monitoring of:
1. Air quality near dumping sites.
2. Drinking water for levels of radioactivity and toxicity and
3. Independent assessment of the levels of pollution at Middle Point and other Tennessee landfills.

ENDIT also urges that all possible efforts be made to clean up dumping sites in Tennessee and that any plans to expand the Middle Point landfill be terminated permanently. In September they forced the Middle Point Landfill to be taken off the list of landfills that can receive this "special" waste.

Here in Memphis we are just starting to fight this.

--Environmental activists

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