Analyze

The case originates in Pacoima California where a small subsection of the community was both concerned and aware that many of the houses in the low income, largely latino neighborhoods, contained lead paints, given many of the houses were constructed before the 1950’s. The Environmental Justice group, Pacomia Beautiful is a Nonprofit environmental organization, focused on community health. PB runs three programs in LA; community inspectors program (identification of hazards sources and simple solution generators), a Youth Environmentalist Program (assists youth to participate in projects to improve environment), and a Safer Home for a Healthy Community Program (Helps residents create healthy homes). In 1999 the group approached the public health lead hazard in multiple ways. They first assessed community knowledge through a pilot project working in tandem with CSUN (Cal State University, Northridge). They educated the community through trained volunteers called promotoras, who went door to door providing resources for lead remediation, working with public policy officials to as well devise a strategy to update current tenet and housing laws in order to prevent future exposure. The group collaborated with UCI, UCLA, LA Department of Health Services, and others to reach 2,500 residents, test children blood levels, test homes, as well as establish a database for homes that had been abated. This study is a great representation of how public health, environmental leaders, neighbors and academia all came together to support a project. As a result, the group along with the local community provided information to 2,500 residents, tested blood lead levels in 675 children, tested 300 homes and renovated (by 2015) 27%, and developed a registry of home that had been abated.

This comment is about how NOLA’s disaster history shapes the risk sensibilities in NOLA anthropocene and the effect of it on discourse of Nuclear Energy in the region. What are the possibilities that Mississippi as an anthropocenic river pose for re-inventing radiation contamination as a risk sensibility of anthropocene and thereby to construct memory as nomadic spatialities in the epoch of anthropocene? 

As I have been working on social movements around nuclear energy and ways of knowing, sensing and representing radiation (contamination), I look for spaces of nuclear cultures. After doing a brief research on the anthropocenics of New Orleans, I pushed myself to know about the Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) in NOLA. There are three NPP that lines the Mississippi river as it flows through Louisiana: Waterford and Riverbend nuclear energy generating stations, Grand Gulf Plant (Port Gibson, Mississippi bordering Louisiana). Of these three NPPs, New Orleans falls within 50 miles of Emergency Planning Zone and on the Ingestion Exposure Pathway of the Waterford NPP[refer to image enclosed (or) shorturl.at/cwG05]. It is also important to note that New Orleans is the headquarters of Entergy Corporation, a fortune 500 company and the second largest generator of nuclear power in the US. Entergy's Indian Point Energy Centre, NY, which I am engaged with, is set for decommissioning in 2021 after polluting the Hudson River with multiple safety events that spanned across 4 decades.

The anthropocenics of New Orleans and environmental groups working against (environmental) degradation focuses mainly on the flooding, rising waters, storming, land use. Conversations about NPPs or safety events, based on what I could gather from secondary resources, seems almost absent. As an article written in the aftermath of Fukushima disaster points out (shorturl.at/bdlmn), "there is no independent watchdog group with expertise in nuclear plant safety keeping a close eye on River Bend, Waterford and Grand Gulf." In addition, the safety infrastructure of the Waterford NPP has largely to do with protection against rising water, flooding and hurricane thus making disaster imagination of Waterford NPP more exterior than interior (shifting focus from disasters arising from the functionality of the plant). How should we read the erasure of radiation contamination risk from the toxic history of New Orleans: as an absence, a construct or a lacunae considering its close proximity to Entergy headquarters?

This may open up spaces for future research in many directions. But what seems particularly interesting to me is how disaster memory fraught by water imageries in NOLA (rising water and hurricanes) shapes risk sensibilities of the New Orleans anthropocenics. If risk sensibilities are shaped largely by water imageries playing a key role in constructing what a disaster means in the region, for me the question remains: How Mississippi can be constructed as waters of anthropocene and as Ivan Illich's Waters of forgetfulness (Lethe), for it to embody the nuclear legacies of radiation contamination at St.Louis, Missouri as the river flows/cuts through the Eastern US? Meticulous archiving of toxic and anthropocenic histories and stories around river and water may bring to them the quality of Mnemosyne, river of remembrance in the epoch of anthropocene. It can be regarded as an effort to render the invisible more than visible and more so, a shift from the temporal significance of memory to a spatial significance of memory with water/river as nomadic spatialities.

The wiki page about the powerplants looks so sanitized for a nuclear energy skeptic like me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Bend_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Safety_record

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterford_Nuclear_Generating_Station

https://www.nola.com/news/business/article_1a47fade-0a81-5ad6-bc57-90ff3d4786b9.html

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/environment/article_33314570-bdc0-11e8-8cce-8398f362ffbb.html

https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=457013

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0525/ML052510099.pdf