Major Fellowship Activities: The bulk of her work included attending hearings and scientific forums, developing analyses on the subjects covered at these events, and disseminating this information to member organizations across the country. She attended congressional hearings on the potential external regulation and reorganization of the DOE, the oversight and progress of a permanent nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain; and the urgent environmental health concerns of many DOE sites. She reviewed the Yucca Mountain Draft Environmental Impact Statement and responded with final comments on its adequacy on behalf of the ANA network.
A major focus of Loulena’s work was on the ongoing health impacts of releases from DOE nuclear weapons production sites. She has worked to compile evidence of community exposure at these sites by interviewing local residents, reading agency reports, compiling environmental data, and meeting with high level DOE officials. She has assembled a historical chronology of compensation cases involving radiation exposure, including such exposures as the Marshall Islands case, the Paducah-Kentucky case, the human radiation experiments, and the Utah downwinders. This chronology will be used as evidence that there are many precedents for compensation cases and the communities surrounding DOE weapons production sites should not be excluded from compensation. Moreover, she attended a Community Research Network conference in Atlanta, Georgia to learn more about new methods for establishing causal relationships between environmental contamination and community illness. This material will be used in a workshop designed to establish compelling evidence that DOE should provide physician training, medical monitoring and health care compensation for these communities. Further, she attended several BEIR VII (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) forums and delivered ANA position statements on the committee’s composition and objectivity.
Concerning disarmament issues, Miles co-organized an educational campaign on the technical, fiscal and serious proliferation problems of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This involved authoring a fact sheet on NIF and a second on Common Myths and Facts on the NIF, coordinating many visits with officials, and informing grassroots members about this irresponsible project. Additionally, in May 2000, Miles represented the Back from the Brink de-alerting nuclear weapons campaign at the Non Proliferation Review Conference at the United Nations. She participated in many workshops, and demonstrations while building alliances with others in the NGO community.
Current Activities: Miles started an estate planning law firm called Miles and Torres Associates. She was previously an attorney with Senior Legal Services of Contra Costa County, California, where she focused on providing legal direct services to senior citizens facing serious legal hurdles to maintaining housing, healthcare and financial solvency. She completed a certification as a mediator through the SEEDS dispute resolution program. She was previously an Associate Attorney with Adams, Broadwell, Joseph and Cardozo. Its clients include a broad range of labor unions, environmental, consumer and other nonprofit organizations and public agencies in administrative proceedings before local, state and federal regulatory and permitting authorities, before legislative bodies and in judicial proceedings. She was a recipient of the 2003 New Voices Fellowship that enabled her to serve as Staff Attorney at Tri-Valley CAREs in Livermore, CA. She headed up a project to oversee the environmental review of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and conducted investigative reporting on U.S. nuclear weapons and biological agent activities. Her work primarily focused on the Livermore Lab’s Site-Wide EIS, which is the lab’s 10 year planning document. She provided analysis of the lab’s impacts from nuclear weapons development to clean up and monitoring of nuclear and hazardous waste. She was involved in litigation challenging the lab’s proposed bio-warfare agent research center. She also participated in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty preparatory conference in 2004 and the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. During law school she received specialization certificates in Environmental and Public Interest Law. She has spoken several times on behalf of the organization on topics such as nuclear nonproliferation and the nuclear waste cycle. She is a board member and treasurer of Tri-Valley CAREs.