Siting Nukes in a Poor Black Town -- If A Black President Does It, Is It Still Environmental Racism?

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Siting Nukes in a Poor Black Town -- If A Black President Does It, Is It Still Environmental Racism?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-dixon/siting-nukes-in-a-poor-bl_b_559103.html

Bruce Dixon
Co-founder, Black Agenda Report
Posted: May 4, 2010 02:01 PM

Siting Nukes in a Poor Black Town -- If A Black President Does It, Is It Still Environmental Racism?

In the weeks since President Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build new nuclear reactors next to an existing pair of nukes in mostly black Burke County, GA, the inconvenient questions, unanswered and mostly unasked, continue to pile up.

The first and most obvious questions are why nukes, and why Burke County?

The answer to "why nukes" is that discussion of the catastrophic risk inherent to nuclear power is pretty much off the table in mainstream media these days. The Obama administration likes to call it "safe nuclear energy," often in the same breath as "clean coal." Both are colossal and equally transparent lies. The 24th anniversary of the horrific nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine on April 24 passed almost unnoticed in the mainstream US media, although video of a brawl over something else in that nation's parliament made most of the networks here. Greenpeace marked the event with the release of a study by more than 50 scientists across the planet who peg the human toll of Chernobyl at a quarter million cancers, 100,000 of them fatal. Like the anniversary of the disaster itself, the Greenpeace story dropped soundlessly down the memory hole. Our amnesia is nearly perfect. I spoke to a class of journalism students at a local university at the beginning of April. Not a one of them ever heard of Chernobyl, or even of Three Mile Island. So why not nukes?

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The fifth bunch of unasked and unanswered questions are whether the people in Shell Bluff, GA want more nukes in their backward, and whether the US is democracy-proof enough to put them there anyway. The first part is easy to answer, as CNN discovered. They don't.

"We had protests, and we voiced our opinion," said one local resident, "and we didn't want them, but it's just, you know -- we're just the little peons."

When the CNN reporter asked asked two local women whether they thought President Obama had "...done enough to make sure that people like you are safe before new reactors are built?" they opined that the president "...doesn't know we're down here." That kind of answers the second part too, doesn't it?

The last question is whether putting inherently dangerous nukes into mostly black Burke County, GA amounts to environmental racism. I asked Clark Atlanta University's Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center and the man who first coined the term "environmental racism" to characterize the frequent placement of toxic and dangerous industrial facilities into minority communities. This is what he told us:

"The siting of risky nuclear power plants in Shell Bluff community in Burke County is consistent with the environmental racism pattern I documented in Dumping in Dixie some two decades ago. In Georgia, there are currently three coal fired power plants proposed for mostly black and poor communities with the promise of jobs. In reality, fenceline black community residents don't get the jobs. They get pollution and more poverty. And they get sick."

So the question hangs --- if a black president does it, is it still environmental racism?

An Earth Day article by Dr. Robert Bullard:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Earth-Day-at-Forty-Still-L-by-Robert-Bullard-100421-640.html

April 21, 2010

Earth Day at Forty Still Leaves "Dirty Dumping in Dixie" Practices in Place
By Robert Bullard

On April 22, 2010, the nation celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. Much has been achieved in environmental and public health protection over these past four decades. However, much work remains, especially in terms of achieving equal protection and equal enforcement of our environmental and energy laws. In the real world, all communities are not created equal. If a community happens to be poor, black or a community of color, or located on the "wrong side of the tracks," it received less protection than communities inhabited largely by affluent whites in the suburbs.

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While renewable energy is being encouraged as the preferred clean strategy, dirty and "risky" energy plants and disposal facilities are being sent to African American communities. A form of "energy apartheid" has blocked millions of poor people and people of color from the green economy. EPA Region 4, eight states in the Deep South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee), best illustrates these Dumping in Dixie practices that have continued unabated over the past four decades.

It is no accident that the modern civil rights movement and environmental justice movement were born in the South. Four decades of EPA Region 4 harmful and discriminatory decisions have turned far too many black communities into the dumping grounds for risky polluting facilities, risky technologies, and dirty energy plants--lowering nearby residents' property values, stealing their wealth, and exposing them to unnecessary environmental health risks.

The nuclear power industry is reinventing itself. Three decades after the last nuclear power plant was commissioned in the U.S., 21 companies have indicated they want to build 34 new reactors. Not surprising, this nuclear power resurgence is heavily concentrated in the southern United States, raising environmental injustice concerns and charge of environmental racism around plant siting. The NRC has already awarded $20 million to 60 universities for scholarships and faculty recruitment and retention to ramp up new nuclear development. Yet, no viable alternative has been found to permanently dispose of or store the 70,000 tons of radioactive waste now stored on site at more than 100 nuclear plants across the country, with 2,000 tons added each year.

Georgia's mostly African American and poor communities are being targeted for risky nuclear power and dirty coal fired power plants. Such facilities are often hyped as providing jobs for local residents. However, most studies show that poor communities get few jobs at these plants are stuck with pollution and poverty. Poor black residents get more promises than jobs--and they get sick. The first nuclear power plant to be built in decades is being proposed with an $8.3 billion loan guarantee in Burke County, GA. The loan guarantee will help the Atlanta-based Southern Company build two more nuclear reactors in the mostly African American Shell Bluff community, a residential area built during the "Jim Crow" era. The two new reactors would each produce 1,000 megawatts, and would work with two existing reactors at a site near Waynesboro, GA (62.5 percent black). Burke County, GA is 51.1 percent black. The next three nuclear power plants in the queue are projects in southern Maryland, San Antonio, and Fairfield County, S.C.

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As we celebrate the 40th Earth Day, let us remember that not much has changed in these four decades for millions of Americans who live on the fenceline with "dirty power" and polluting industries. Environmental justice communities in Georgia, Region 4, and the rest of the country want to see the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu initiate a strategic plan and timetable for implementing the 1994 Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 to ensure that "low-income populations and minority populations" get their fair share of renewable energy, green jobs, and clean industries--and move away from dirty polluting energy that ultimately ends up in communities of color. The DOE needs to expand its environmental justice initiatives to better serve those communities that have been systematically left behind.

It is time for bold leadership and real change at the EPA, DOE, TVA, and other government agencies charged with moving us to a clean energy future. It is time to close the clean energy gap that contributes to the climate gap. Our faith based and civil rights groups also need to be more proactive in promoting environmental justice and climate justice and demanding an equitable clean energy future for the black community. Such a move makes good economic, environment, health, climate and sustainability sense. And it's the right and just thing to do.

Robert D. Bullard directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. His most recent book is entitled Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Westview Press 2009).