"Yucca Mountain" Snake Mountain
Snake Mountain "Yucca Mountain" is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. LEARN MORE
There is a centuries-old story of Snake Mountain that is still taught to the children of the Western Shoshone Nation.
"Someday when we wake that snake up it will get mad and rip open," Shoshone Spiritual Leader Corbin Harney wrote in his 1995 book "The Way it Is - One Water, One Air, One Mother Earth."
"With his tail, that snake will move the mountain, rip it open and the poison will come out on the surface."
Today Snake Mountain is called Yucca Mountain, site of the under-construction high-level nuclear waste repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and about 15 miles east of Death Valley in Inyo County. LEARN MORE
US Fails to Respond to UN Request; Western Shoshone Petition for Public Support
Protection of the land is critical to the Western Shoshone’s preservation of their cultural and spiritual integrity. But among the threats it now faces is a plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and to conduct open-pit gold mining at Mt. Tenabo, both areas that are spiritually significant to the Western Shoshone. LEARN MORE
Western Shoshone Nation Uses 1863 Treaty to Stop Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste
The Western Shoshone National Council has filed a lawsuit against the plan of the United States Department of Energy to make Yucca Mountain the dump for nuclear waste from the United States and from forty-one other countries around the world. Yucca Mountain is located in the Territory of the Western Shoshone Nation, as described in Article 5 of the 1863 Treaty of Peace and Friendship entered into between the Western Shoshone Nation and the United States, at Baa Gaa Zoo (also now called Ruby Valley, Nevada).
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"I have always felt the Western Shoshone have the best claim to stop Yucca Mountain," attorney Robert Hager said, flanked by tribal leaders outside Lloyd George U.S. Courthouse in Las Vegas where the case was filed.
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PROTECT YUCCA MOUNTAIN
Contact your Senators and Congressional Representatives, and write to Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials, and urge them to oppose the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage project.
You may call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and leave a message for your Senators OPPOSING nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain.
Send postal mail:
Secretary Spencer Abraham
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20585
Carol Hanlon
U.S. Department of Energy
Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office
(M/S#025)
P.O. Box 30307
North Las Vegas, NV 89036-0307
