Antinuclear

Race and Radiation: The Equal Opportunity Killer at the Savannah River Site DC Bureau By Joseph Trento,  September 6th, 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…..

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.

The ugliest of America’s nuclear weapons history is the cavalier way in which the old Atomic Energy Commission and later Department of Energy management allowed African American workers to be deliberately exposed to radiation at the sprawling Savannah River Site while sparing white workers from the same dangers. The good-old-boy white management at SRS routinely released radiation into the Savannah River. While phone calls were made warning white towns downstream to close their town’s water intakes, often black towns did not get the same courtesy.

African American workers were given the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs and told to drop their dosimeters, which measured their exposure to radiation, in a bucket before going into high-level radiation areas so there would be no cumulative record of dosage. They also were encouraged to bring contaminated food from farms on SRS property home to feed their families.

“The racial factors, black and white, are divided,” said Bobbie Paul, Executive Director for Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND). “There’s a power structure that goes on.”

Robert Lindsay was among the first African Americans to experience racial discrimination at SRS during the cold war. He had been the principal for an all-black high school when he accepted an offer to work at “the bomb plant” in 1952 because he would make more money to support his wife and ten children. He, like many other African Americans at the time, was sent to work in the plant’s most hazardous areas, and he suffered grave consequences….

Robert Lindsay began showing signs of illness as early as two year into working at SRS. His family and others were never told why their loved ones were dying. For white workers there was a nuclear laundry so that they did not bring home contaminated clothing to expose their families to radiation. But there was no such laundry for the African American workers so they returned home with radiation on their work clothes and exposed their wives and children. The only thing the families knew were that men like Robert Lindsay came home from work sicker and sicker until one day they could not go back to SRS.

It took ten years for SRS to kill Robert Lindsay. He was driven home from work in 1964 for the last time and died soon after from cancer caused by radiation exposure.

“A lot of them got exposed and some of them got exposed and exceeded the limit and they kept them in the job,” Aiken County Councilman Willar Hightower said……

Racial discrimination has haunted SRS throughout its 60 year history. Even the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s biggest, new “state of the art” project, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, is no exception.

“Where I’m from and how I was brought up, I felt like I was equal and that these people have no right to tell me I’m not,” said Johnson who came to South Carolina from Oceanside, CA. “So I fought for that. There are a lot of people out there who are afraid to say anything.”…. http://www.dcbureau.org/201209067618/national-security-news-service/race-and-radiation-the-equal-opportunity-killer-at-the-savannah-river-site.html