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In response to multiple concerns about water quality expressed by residents, EJCAN launched a water quality testing initiative with university-based collaborators from UNC Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University. Threats to water include but are not limited to industrialized agriculture. Industrialized hog feces contain pathogens, heavy metals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria that growers store in large, open pit lagoons (Grant 1999; Wing et al. 2008; Blanchette 2019; Christenson et al. 2022). When operators spray the waste onto nearby fields, they also release air and waterborne contaminants. Scholars have linked airborne emissions from industrial hog operations to respiratory dysfunction, mood disorders, compromised immune function, anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, and low birth weight (Wing et al. 2000; Kravchenko et al. 2018; Guidry et al. 2018). Moreover, the odor is noxious, causing nausea, embarrassment, disorientation, and social loss in cultural continuity as people cease culturally meaningful practices like gardening, going for walks, or gathering outside to share food (Herring 2014; Blanchette 2019). The impacts to water include contamination, harmful algal blooms, fish kills, and eutrophication in rivers and estuaries, especially when hurricanes flood the inner coastal plains with industrialized animal waste (Wing et al. 2000; Wing et al. 2008; NCCN 2021; Emanuel 2018; Christenson et al. 2022). Access to water infrastructure in Sampson County is highly uneven, and residents have been advocating for improved access for more than a decade. 

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