Can a black president be guilty of environmental racism? President Obama's new proposed nukes are in one of the poorest areas east of the Mississippi. Burke County Georgia is majority black, the home of existing commercial nuclear reactors and directly across the river from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility. Its river is the 4th most polluted in the nation, and its residents are suffering a veritable epidemic of unexplained cancers, with no local, federal, public or private funds available to test their air, soil, water or environment for its causes. But Burke County's residents are neither silent nor powerless.
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
President Obama's proposal to place a pair of new reactors in a majority black Georgia town a mere 4 miles from the existing nuclear weapons site at Savannah River and next door to Georgia Power's existing nukes at Vogtle selectively penalizes and endangers poor black communities and will cost black lives. When the president and his nuclear industry donors try to pass off these new Georgia nukes as a job creation measure for one of the poorest counties east of the Mississippi, their hypocrisy and cynicism are transparent and inescapable.
The Savannah River, which flows between the nuclear weapons site on the South Carolina side, and the existing and proposed electric utility reactors on the Georgia side is already a SuperFund site and the 4th most toxic river in the nation, according to the EPA. Until 2003 the federal government funded limited testing of the air, water and wildlife on the South Carolina side adjacent to the weapons plant, but this funding was discontinued during the Bush administration. As far as we know, nobody tests the air, ground water, wildlife or humans living on the Georgia side of the river, or near Georgia Power's existing reactors. But local residents do say there is a cancer epidemic in Waynesboro.
"I lost a brother, a cousin, a sister to cancer, and my daddy... My mother had cancer when she died in her old age." said Claude Howard, assistant pastor at Fairfield Missionary Baptist Church to the Georgia Green Party's Hugh Esco at a public meeting called by Georgia WAND in Waynesboro Monday. Rev. Howard's deceased brother worked at nuclear Plant Vogtle. "I'm here now, concerned about the environment, about nuclear waste from Plant Vogtle by the riverside, about the amount of tritium and whatever other chemical agents are getting in our water supply." Rev. Howard's family, like many others in Burke County, depend on wells fed by ground water which may have been contaminated by leaks of radioactive tritium from the area's multiple nukes.
But Waynesboro, with a population of about 6,000, cannot afford to test the air and water. So far, no help is coming from Burke County or the state of Georgia either. The utility companies who make millions off their existing reactors at Vogtle, and to whom the Obama Administration wants to give $8 billion in free money for more nukes are under little or no obligation to test the air, the ground water, the local environment or the local population. Their only obligations are to their stockholders and the gods of profit.
"We're just caught in the middle of it," declared Annie Laura Stephens, another Waynesboro resident. "We don't have a lot of money for legal (expenses) but we have put out a lot... But they have more money and expertise than we have. All we have is just Jesus."
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