Have you ever heard of Carrie Barefoot Dickerson? I didn't think so. She is a true Oklahoma hero, the hero of this story, the story of the only utility scale nuclear power plant in the United States ever permitted for construction, begun, and then completely abandoned. Here I tell my own very small part in that story and some of the interesting ripples it has sent through my life.
First I'll disclose that I am a fully trained opponent of utility scale nuclear power plants located anywhere; beyond certain small applications such as nuclear medicine and naval propulsion, I oppose all large scale nuclear applications anywhere on the planet. My training began one fine Spring day as I was serving as a Lt(jg), stationed on a ship in Connecticut, off the ship while exercising submarine attacks in a land-based simulator, along with my McHale's Navy style colleagues, from our about to be scuttled, World War II, reserve destroyer, where I was waiting out the Viet Nam War.
Suddenly, in the middle of the simulated exercise and without warning I was ordered off my ship and enrolled immediately in Nuclear Weapons school in Norfolk, VA, and then dispatched directly to a guided missile destroyer of the real Navy, about to undergo the uninformatively named Navy Technical Proficiency Inspection. We all called it what it was, the Nuclear Technical Proficiency Inspection. From that moment on, I knew that if the Navy was prepared to entrust me with all of this under these conditions, then the very idea the United States Government had any sense at all of how to handle nuclear materials was fucked up beyond all hope of redemption. So, I became instantly and irrevocably opposed to nuclear power plants because I knew that Homer Simpson (long before he became part of the fabric of American culture) existed by the thousands in the nuclear area of the military-industrial complex. Not that I resemble Homer that much.
Anyway, these past couple of weeks I have never been more proud of my later arrest record, which dates back to a civil disobedience action on the construction site of Black Fox nuclear power plant in Inola, Oklahoma in 1979. Organized under the amorphous name, Sunbelt Alliance, affinity groups (think "cells") formed and, in various combination, conducted various sorts of direct, non-violent action.
We named our affinity group "Nuclear Exclusion". If you check your insurance policy on your car or house you'll probably find language that says that if your property is destroyed by nuclear attack or accident, they don't have to pay you. We named our group after the policy clause and ran the group basically as an anarchy. It worked for us because we came together in common for only certain things.
Our biggest action involved getting Anti-Nuke art (In Case of Nuclear Accident, Kiss your Child Goodbye; People, not Profits. No Nukes) for free from a student, having it silk-screened onto hundreds of t-shirts, selling the shirts at a Jackson Brown/Bonnie Raitt concert in a city park and stiffing the company that made the shirts. Property is crime. We used the money to underwrite our other actions. One of our members called herself Gloria Dialectic.
Groups like ours were ready when the Sunbelt Alliance formed to band groups together for the "occupation" of the Black Fox nuclear power plant construction site. About 500 people camped out in the rain in a near-by State Park the previous night with the usual wine, folk music and dope smoking. Each affinity group member was organized into either occupation or support rolls. I went over the fence with the 19 yo wife of a student at the law school I had myself recently graduated from. But it's a lot easier to keep someone out of the bar than it is to kick someone out of the bar, so I went in and he stayed behind in support.
We called it an occupation because we equipped ourselves with supplies of food, water and other necessities to set up and sustain a campground on the site to impede further construction. We were all immediately arrested and toted off, instead, but did successfully set off a frenzy of media coverage of anti-nuclear sentiment in, even then, a very conservative corner of the World.
Over the next few years, a legal story unfolded that I still enjoy laughing about. The first thing was that the local DA agreed that our defense team would put on trial a small group of defendants from the ranks of the occupiers who could fully represent the reason for the occupation. In return the prosecutor agreed to fines only, if that group was convicted, dismissal for all if not, and all defendants agreed to be bound by the outcome of the one trial.
Our defense was duress, which basically boils down to, I have a defense if I can prove I did a very small wrong thing in order to try and stop a much bigger wrong thing that actually threatens my health or life personally. The defense won't let you get away with setting a trap-gun against a window peeper, but it would probably cover much of what that Home Alone kid did. We presented our case as the choice between the essentially harmless act of mere trespass versus the specter of nuclear death.
Our lawyers put on experts who had volunteered from all over the country who quite honestly laid out the parade of horribles that Black Fox could possibly visit on the world around it and the more or less permanent horror that it would leave, perhaps forever, in its still lethal cooling pools and containment, long after the plant itself was fading history.
The jury hung. The DA did not refile.
The funny part is what happened to the TV reporters who went over the fence and got the great footage we so wanted, The DA arrested them too. But they weren't part of our deal because they went over the fence for a completely different reason than we did. They proudly proclaimed that they were trespassing because of the 1st Amendment, to get the story.
The Jury didn't buy it.
The Trial Judge didn't buy it.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals didn't buy it.
The U.S. Supreme Court didn't buy it. I still chuckle.
Maybe the last laugh was on me, though. Many years later I had occasion to need admission to the bar of a different state. Though a process called reciprocity, an attorney admitted in one state can be admitted in many of the other states merely upon payment of a fee, application, and extensive personal disclosures. This obliged me to obtain all the documentation relating to my arrest and prosecution and disclose the full circumstances of the Black Fox matter.
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the charges from the Black Fox occupation had never been dismissed and remained pending. I called the DA, who I knew from having worked for nearly a decade at the State Capitol as a senior Assistant to a statewide elected official. He graciously dismissed the charges acknowledging without a fuss that there seemed to be a serious speedy trial issue. Then came the great fun of explaining all of this to the Supreme Court of a different state.
But no one should ever forget that the heavy lifting that ultimately stopped Black Fox was done by true Oklahoma hero, Carrie Barefoot Dickerson, whose organization, Citizen's Action for Safe Energy (CASE), used every regulatory trick in the book, and wrote a few of their own, to bog the project down to the point where the economics of it could no longer support continuing construction. Our action was more of a sideshow, designed to draw and hold attention on opposition to the plant and pique public interest. But it sure was a lot of fun.
Ending utility scale nuclear power and otherwise minimizing it's use is essential to human survival in my estimation. How sad it would be if the Human Race's epitaph was, merely, the planet shrugged a little bit and soon became too radioactive for people to live there anymore.