Sierra Club Calls on Rumsfeld, DOD to Stop Blocking Wind Farms

Suit filed against Defense Department for delaying study of windmill threats to security

San Francisco: The Sierra Club today filed suit against Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. Department of Defense for creating a virtual moratorium on the construction of new wind power plants. Rumsfeld and DOD have failed to complete a congressionally mandated study of windmills' impact on radar. In the meantime, DOD, Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Aviation Administration have halted wind farm construction "within radar line of sight" of any military radar--which has effectively stopped construction across the U.S.

"While the Defense Department drags its feet studying if wind farms are a threat to national security, Americans are missing out on cleaner, cheaper energy," said Kristin Henry, staff attorney for Sierra Club. "If the military can have windmills and effective radar at Guantanamo, why can't we have both in the Midwest?"

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims that the Department of Defense has violated the Administrative Procedure Act and will seek to "compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed." 5 U.S.C. § 706(1).

The move by the Bush administration to link wind power to national security threats is especially ironic given that it took a recent decision of the Ninth Circuit Court to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider the potential impacts from a terrorist attack on nuclear facilities when conducting environmental reviews.

"The same administration that didn't want to consider terrorism when building nuclear plants is saying that windmills may be a threat to national security," said Henry