The question of how reactors operate and how corporations dispose of waste is central to issues of democracy, pollution prevention and reduction, and site remediation. It involves ethical issues of environmental justice. CAN addresses these issues from the position of a contaminated community. We speak for citizens in the pollution pathway of reactors and waste sites. CAN’s members live in the shadow of nuclear reactors through the Northeast corridor. We are committed to a green energy future for our communitiesour work is informed by our history of living in the shadow of nuclear reactors.

We organize to replace New England and New York's aging fleet of nukes with sustainable energy solutions, conservation and efficiency. We seek to demystify nuclear technology and its jargon that intimidates, isolates and obstructs citizens from effective democratic participation. This participation is essential for communities to adequately protect themselves from victimization through industrial contamination. The scientific community and the nuclear industry undermine confidence in citizen's ability to understand nuclear power and its effects resulting in alienation, powerlessness, and a lack of involvement by citizens in environmental protection. Citizens can and must understand nuclear power.

We educate and empower communities living in the pollution pathway of nuclear facilities to protect themselves from the effects of exposure to low-level radiation and to develop strategies for the prevention and elimination of nuclear pollution. The creation of nuclear waste must stop and that nuclear power’s final solution is determined democratically and safely, respecting the health and safety of workers, communities, and the environment.

Communities chosen to suffer nuclear contamination are routinely poor, rural and often people of color. As imiseration expands in the current political climate, communities are hard pressed to value health and safety over short-term financial relief. It is unacceptable:

· to force people to choose between immediate economic survival and the sacrifice of future generations.

• for a corporation to control and contaminate a community's water and air on a routine, regular basis.

• to contaminate the water, earth, and air of another community to clean our community up.

• that radioactive pollution be an acceptable by-product of energy production and that communities in the effluent pathway, the pollution pathway, suffer increases in disease.

· that poor, rural and people of color communities are routinely chosen to suffer corporate contamination.

A Green policy on radioactive waste must be developed to protect the environment. It will be driven by the concerns of ordinary citizens working to protect their children and future generations from contamination.

· Halt the production and the shipment of rad waste off site. The waste solutions proposed by nuclear corporations pit sacrifice community against sacrifice community, manipulate fears of contamination, support opportunism, and develop an illusory fallacy - reactors, clean when operating, are now dirty and dangerous if waste remains on-site as an interim or possible permanent solution to the waste problem. The DOE estimates 85,000 tons of irradiated fuel will be produced by the present generation of reactors alone. Only 30,000 tons has been produced so far.

· Create an Independent Review of Waste The democratic process is the best gardian for the development of an environmentally safe solution.

· Recognize nuclear power as experimental and acknowledge that the health effects of nuclear waste on pathway communities is dangerous. Institute contamination studies, initiated by citizens in partnership with scientists, to increase understanding of long-term exposure to low-level radiation. These studies should focus on the effluent pathway. These studies can become a laboratory for the creation of techniques to study contaminated communities.

· Return a percentage of the Nuclear Waste Fund to the generators to maintain on-site storage. Acknowledge the truth, the waste is going nowhere for the forseeable future.

· Create Hardened On-SIte Storage of Nuclear Waste: Post 9/11 it is important for nuclear corporations to protect their high level waste from acts of malice. Fuel is vulnerable in fuel pools and though less dangerous in dry cask storage, present cannisters are not sufficient to protect the waste and therefore reactor communities.

· Create Citizen Advisory Boards in reactor communities. Communities inliving in the shadow of nuclear facilities require meaningful participate in pollution prevention. Citizens must create a substantive role in order to clarify, negotiate and protect their community's interests as well as satisfying the requirements for democracy.

· The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should institute long term on site cool down as the preferred decommissioning option for radioactive debris. This would allow irradiated waste to remain on-site for sixty years. This is an essential first phase of waste reduction through natural decay.

· Include citizens in the problem solving process to determine the eventual storage for rad waste. To effectively participate in democracy, citizens must have access to the full range of scientific opinion concerning low-level radiation, rad-waste, and nuclear power. If we can understand that the world is our neighbor, then we can end the cycle of contamination and sacrifice.