[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: "Race and Radiation: The Equal Opportunity Killer at the Savannah River Site"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Race and Radiation: The Equal Opportunity Killer at the Savannah  
River Site

By Joseph Trento
National Security News Service
September 6, 2012

The old Atomic Energy Commission did not give much thought to where  
they were going to put their new nuclear weapons processing plant in  
the 1950s other than it needed to be on the other side of the country  
from their World War II era facility in Hanford, Washington. The  
military planners wanted the two campuses as difficult as possible  
for Soviet bombers to attack simultaneously. The location picked  
during the Truman administration ended up being in the heart of the  
segregated South, near Aiken, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia,  
because the site was large and had access to water for cooling the  
massive new reactors.

At SRS, five reactors, two separation plants, thousands of miles of  
pipes and high level nuclear waste storage facilities were built on  
what amounts to a swamp with the worst earthquake fault in the South  
running under it. Towns were relocated and the orchards, hunting and  
fishing grounds that sustained the lives of poor residents were taken  
over by a country fighting a new kind of war - a cold war. The  
reactors were built five miles apart so if the Soviets attacked one,  
the others could survive and keep producing plutonium. Production  
wastes - deadly to humans - were buried in cardboard boxes in open  
trenches.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.dcbureau.org/201209067618/national-security-news-service/ 
race-and-radiation-the-equal-opportunity-killer-at-the-savannah-river- 
site.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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