NFFA Award Winner Deb Haaland to Become US Secretary of the Interior

In early September, the Nuclear Free Future Foundation awarded US Congresswoman Deb Haaland with the Nuclear Free Future Award. The Democrat campaigns for social justice, climate protection or against uranium mining in the Bears Ears Nature Park, a National Monument of the United States. Now she has been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden as Secretary of the Interior, as reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and meanwhile several other media.

Since 1998, the Nuclear Free Future Award has been honoring people around the world who are engaged in working for the end of the nuclear age and who show ways to end both the military and civil use of nuclear energy. "We are delighted that a personality who is active in our interests is to be assigned such a responsible governmental task," says NFFF Foundation founder Franz Moll, assessing Deb Haaland's nomination. "I hope that the US Senate will now confirm her nomination."

Joe Biden had already announced that he would put together "the most diverse cabinet in the history" of the USA. Deb Haaland, born in 1960 in Laguna Pueblo in the US state of New Mexico, would be the first Native American woman to be appointed to the cabinet. In 2018, she was already elected to the US Congress as one of the first Native American members.

The voice of Democrat Deb Haaland has been well heard in Washington ever since. She is currently one of the campaigners for an extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 2019: the financial compensation is to include uranium miners after 1971, as well as the Trinity Downwinders. Trinity was the world's first nuclear weapon test in 1945 – on the land of the Mescalero Apache. To this day, the descendants of the contaminated victims are waiting for compensation.

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