Pulsar lost colony nuclear device7/3/2023 Mary and Carrie Dann “trespassed” on the NTS in 1974, resulting in the Department of the Interior Suing the two sisters. Local communities mobilized against this injustice. Studies that have attempted to include native subsistence diets, by looking at estimated doses from eating rabbits, have resulted in dose estimates above DOE estimates for all pathways combined in the area of Duckwater, Nevada. The surveys used to create these dose reconstructions did not even include Native Americans. As a result, radiation exposures calculated for Native Americans living downwind of the NTS are not accurately represented in DOE dose reconstructions. Most of the research on the health impacts of nuclear testing used research tools that did not take into account indigenous lifestyles and diets. Community members who were exposed as children now experience twice the thyroid cancer risk of non-native people. As a result, Native American communities have experienced poor health and an excess of radiation related diseases in themselves. Atomic Energy Commission members even described the native communities downwind of the test site as a “low-use segment of the population”. The policy of the Atomic Energy Commission was to cede testing when the wind was blowing South, towards Las Vegas and Los Alamos, but testing was allowed to occur when wind was blowing east towards Native American and Mormon communities. Moreover, decisions were explicitly made that increased the exposure of indigenous peoples to fallout. From 1951, to 1992, 220 of the above and below ground nuclear tests released radioactive plumes, a majority of which traveled east over Native American reservations. Since 1963, all of the tests were conducted underground, but the tests still leaked radiation into the atmosphere. Since 1951, there have been around 900 nuclear tests for both Great Britain and the US at the NTS, 105 of which were above ground, and all of which were conducted on land that belongs to the Western Shoshone. The NTS was used for nuclear weapons testing until 1992 when the US ceased nuclear weapons testing in response to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Although nuclear tests were detonated in the name of national security, Western Shoshone communities experienced a very real nuclear war as a result of the US testing program. Nuclear testing constitutes an environmental injustice because of the physical and emotional intergenerational trauma caused through changing the very genes of the indigenous people exposed to fallout, as well as turning their local environments dangerously radioactive. Altogether, the area downwind from the NTS consists of mostly Native Americans and Mormons, both marginalized communities in the US. Native communities that surround the NTS include the Moapa reservation to the southeast, the Pahrump Paiute Tribe and the Las Vegas Paiute Colony to the south, the Duckwater Shoshone and Yomba Shoshone to the northwest, the Timbisha Shoshone to the west, and the Goshute reservation to the northeast, which does not even include the historic use of the land by many different sects of the Mojave and other Great Basin Native Americans.
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