A Falsification of Nuclear Power History
by Lorna Salzman
Michelle Chen, a blogger for colorlines.com and In These Times, has written a fabricated and uninformed piece on nuclear power and environmental racism, timed to coincide with worldwide indignation and horror over the Fukushima nuclear accident and to score some political points. This was followed up by another foolish talk by Raymond Lotta at the Left Forum in New York, which was if anything even more of a fabrication, concluding that communism is the answer. I guess he didn't ask the right question.
Only someone who has been absent from the most important environmental movement of the 20th century could have written such an article. It lacks all historic veracity and reaches conclusions that are equally invalid, in denouncing nuclear power as a conspiracy against minorities.
It is true, as she acknowledges, that uranium mining on indigenous lands in the American west and the Australian outback imposed terrible health costs on the nearby communities. What she doesn't acknowledge, however, is that many white environmentalists and groups far away in large cities fought against the mining and for the rights of the local communities, as well as demanding clean-up and reparations. The anti-nuclear movement, comprised mostly of middle class whites and led largely by women, was a vocal opponent of uranium mining on native lands, in an opposition as strong as that expressed against nuclear reactors. The entire nuclear fuel cycle from mining to radioactive waste storage and disposal was pushed into the public consciousness. Notwithstanding this fact, many people and organizations on the left ignored the threats and only now since the Fukushima accident are they suddenly awakening from their thirty-year stupor. Join the world, folks!
In this battle, as in just about every other environmental battle of the 20th century, non-indigenous minorities - e.g. American blacks - were completely absent, invisible, silent. For their efforts, white environmental activists were routinely smeared as privileged upper middle class elitists interested only in protecting their own back yards. They were accused of ignoring the "real" environmental problems of poverty in minority communities. The large national organizations were accused of racism because their leaders were all white----mainly because blacks had no interest in joining these organizations or working alongside them on environmental issues.
A partial reason for this lay in the reluctance of minority communities to actually call their local battles environmental ones. By defining them only as examples of discrimination or inequity,they in effect kept potential environmental allies at a distance. They wanted it both ways: they wanted whites to put black community issues first in their OWN campaigns, while insisting that whites not "take over" the issues. They wanted to call the shots in their community battles ---which is perfectly OK-----but attack environmentalists for not dropping their own work.
One reason for this lies in the origins of environmentalism. Starting with John Muir and the Sierra Club, conservation of natural resources, species and ecosystems was the first focus of the movement, and these campaigns were therefore rural-based rather than urban. The first big battle of the 1970s was against the construction of an oil pipeline to carry the newly found oil of the Alaskan North Slope south. The second was against development of the SST, supersonic transport. In both of these battles there was an amazing unity and solidarity of all the major national environmental groups. Afterwards, activism at the community level exploded around a variety of issues, not just wilderness-related ones. In urban areas, of course, problems of poverty, education, transportation and housing dominated. It was natural that urban minority communities would take these on.
There is no inherent conflict between movements focusing on wilderness and natural resources and those focusing on inner city problems. One would think that powerful coalitions would have emerged. Despite the existence of grassroots, regional and national organizations which devoted their time and effort to defending public health, safety and the environment for ALL citizens, blacks never joined these groups or formed coalitions with them around any of the numerous issues that affected local communities. Instead they railed at "environmental racism" and the absence of black faces in these groups.....groups they had not only studiously ignored but attacked without reason.
More crucial is the fact that black communities, even today, have yet to confront corporate power, capitalism and the obsession with economic growth and consumption. There were probably many reasons for this: a leadership that was motivated by racial politics and interests, such as that of rabblerouser Al Sharpton; a conservative black religious community; and of course the aspirations of blacks to positions of status, power and wealth in the white establishment. With such aspirations, the objectives of the establishment are not likely to be opposed but embraced. Most American blacks have thrown their votes to the Democrats and to those sectors of the economy that offer a way up.
Chen talks about the nuclear power plant near Johannesburg in South Africa, as if this were an insult and danger to South African blacks, as opposed to a danger to ALL South Africans. She seems unaware that the Indian Point nuclear reactors in NYS are located in upscale white Westchester County and that they threaten all the nearby mainly white suburban counties not to mention all of NYC 25 miles to the south. Then there are the Millstone reactors on the affluent Connecticut coast, and those in California...and on and on and on.
Here are some excerpts from her article:
South Africa's nuclear dreams fall on a historical trajectory stretching from imperialism to modern-day resource exploitation. Decades ago, South Africa led the continent in nuclear development and capitalized on its native uranium stores. Although today South Africa is ignored in the geopolitical discourse on non-proliferation, nuclear power is entwined in roots of apartheid and its massive security state.
David Fig, author of Uranium Road: Questioning South Africa's Nuclear Direction, broke down the country's atomic evolution on "Democracy Now!":
South Africa had a lot of uranium. And so, the first time that we were integrated into the world nuclear industry was through providing uranium to the bomb programs of your country, the United States, and Britain, in the '40s and '50s. And then, as prizes, we were given research reactors by President Eisenhower. And later, during apartheid, the world turned a blind eye while we made nuclear weapons. And so, the nuclear energy industry was just a smokescreen, in a way, for arming apartheid during the Cold War.
If safety in the nuclear age can't be guaranteed for all, the industry and its friends in government can always try a more efficient method of managing risk: confine the danger zone to the populations they see as less worthy of protection.
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Perhaps I am wrong but her statement about South Africa leading the continent in nuclear development and capitalizing on its uranium stores sounds dangerously like the argument that nuclear power is OK provided it is owned and run by the people. But she becomes hyperbolic when she says nuclear power is "entwined in the roots of apartheid and its massive security state". This is nothing more than political rhetoric masking sheer ignorance of the origins and purpose of the nuclear establishment. In this country it grew out of the weapons program as a way of making jobs for scientists and engineers formerly involved in that program at the numerous national laboratories like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. It also provided a kind of apology for the nuclear bomb by saying, in effect, that there were "peaceful" uses of the atom. Nuclear power is an outgrowth not of capitalism but of technocracy, and a universal one to boot.
No, the danger zone is not confined to minority populations, as the 104 American nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island, Indian Point and Fukushima demonstrate. Nor can one blame capitalism, as she also suggests, because the American utilities were dragged kicking and screaming into building reactors because they recognized the dangers quite clearly. They refused the entreaties until they go exemption from liability for accidents, cheap uranium enrichment, tax benefits and lots of other goodies. The push came from the government itself and from the nuclear physics establishment, and even though the dangers of nuclear power exceed all other technologies, it was for them the crowning pinnacle of prestige, status and technocracy.
Nor does Chen understand that the technocratic elites abroad, in both developed and less developed countries, enthusiastically embraced the technology for similar reasons. India was of course the prime example, followed by China. The elites form their own international class without borders. These other countries, most of them deficient in democratic institutions, cared not a whit for the health and well-being of their own people and thus were complicit in hiding the truth about the risks to the public and the environment. Japan was and is in this respect possibly the worst offender and its people accepted the technology without scrutiny or any doubts about the truthfulness of its government and choice of technology.
It is hard for environmental activists who have dedicated their working lives to protecting the public and the environment from insults like nuclear power to be reminded of how so many on the left who professed to support social justice could have remained so uninvolved and indifferent for so many decades. For them now to take advantage of an environmental tragedy to promote a false history and analysis is, to put it mildly, reprehensible.