Make Certain Nuclear Plants Are Not Just in Our Backyards

With all that has occurred in Japan regarding the tenable nuclear disaster, it should cause African Americans to think about the promotion of increased nuclear power for the U.S., not in terms of jobs and other benefits but the safety of how and where these sites are built.

The U.S. has a history of environmental racism. Environmental racism can be defined as the intentional positioning of hazardous waste sites, landfills and polluting industries in minority and poor communities.

In February 2010, President Obama announced a proposal of $8.33 billion in guaranteed loans to help build the first new nuclear reactors in the town of Shell Bluff, which is located in Burke County, Ga. The administration has also proposed tripling the funding for other nuclear power plants from $18 billion to $54 billion in his 2011 fiscal budget.

This effort would place nuclear reactors in one of the poorest areas east of the Mississippi, which happens to be majority black and also directly across the river from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility. Residents already suffer disproportionately from unexplained cancers.

The question is whether or not the sizable risk of placing these plants in such locations place African Americans and poor rural communities at greater risk than others. According to Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, 68 percent of African Americans live disproportionately closer to such facilities than other ethnic groups. From Dickson, Tenn., where a landfill has been linked to neurological and developmental harm and cancer to areas in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi that pose imminent and substantial danger, the majority of people in these places who live within a one-mile radius of these sites are people of color.

Studies have shown that more blacks than whites lived in communities with such risk and that African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of causing the greatest health dangers. If Obama and America desire increased nuclear energy production, then we must become knowledgeable about the subject and demand that our politicians spread the locations of these plants around and not just concentrate them in the backyards of African Americans. –torrance stephens, ph.d.

Torrance Stephens authors the blog rawdawgb.blogspot.com. Find him on twitter.com/rawdawgbuffalo.