Pioneer of Anti-Nuclear Movement to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award from 14 Organizations
Ceremony at Carnegie Institute for Science to Celebrate 30 Years of Activism by Michael Mariotte;
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Michael Mariotte, the president of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), will be honored Monday (November 10, 2014) by more than a dozen environmental organizations in recognition of his three decades of work to educate the public and lawmakers about the dangers of nuclear power.
The Lifetime Achievement Award honoring Mariotte is coming from Environment America, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Beyond Nuclear, Center for Study of Responsive Law, The Guacamole Fund, the Independent Council for Safe Energy Fund, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the World Information Service on Energy, and NIRS.
The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Mariotte by consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
Among his many achievements over 30 years, Mariotte led the successful fight to block the Calvert Cliffs-3 reactor project in Maryland. In the 1990s, he initiated a program to support fledgling anti-nuclear groups across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union with tens of thousands of dollars in grants and visits by U.S. energy experts to Ukraine, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary. Drawing upon public awareness of the 1986 Chernobyl reactor disaster, Mariotte played a major role in the fight to defeat federal "Mobile Chernobyl" legislation that would have permitted the mass transportation nationwide of irradiated fuel/nuclear waste, with the outcome hinging on a one-vote margin of victory in the U.S. Senate in 2000.
Mariotte influenced an entire generation of anti-nuclear activists by bringing the idea of "anti-nuclear action camps" from Europe to the U.S. and helped organize six of them -- three in New England and three in the Midwest. The Vermont Yankee reactor shutdown announcement came 15 years to the day after the arrests of members of the first New England action camp.
Mariotte, 61, who is being treated for pancreatic cancer, remains very active in opposing the expansion of nuclear power. A former journalist, Mariotte joined NIRS in February 1985, became executive director October 1986, and was named its president on January 1, 2014. Mariotte currently runs NIRS website (www.nirs.org), NIRS' GreenWorld blog (www.safeenergy.org), and the NIRS social media outreach programs.
WHEN:
Monday, November 10, 2014
TIME:
6 – 9 p.m. EST
WHERE:
Carnegie Institute for Science, 1530 P St. NW, Washington, DC, 20005
TO REGISTER FOR THE EVENT: Go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lifetime-achievement-award-for-michael-mariotte-tickets-13472918863?ref=enivtefor001&invite=NzA2ODIwNy9hZmlzaGVyQGNpdGl6ZW4ub3JnLzA%3D&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=attend&ref=enivtefor001
SOURCE Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD
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