ANA Fall Meeting & SRS site tour

[Photo by Nikolas Peterson, executive director of Hanford Challenge. Pictured from left to right are: Joanne Sweeney/Nuclear Watch South; Andrea Jones/GA WAND; Alfred Meyer/PSR; Tanvi Kardile/OREPA; Kimmy Igla/PeaceWorks Kansas City; Ellen Barfield/Veterans for Peace; Scott Kovac/Nuclear Watch New Mexico; Lon Burnam/Peace Farm; Ann Suellentrop/PeaceWorks Kansas City; Kevin Kamps/Beyond Nuclear; Ellen Thomas/Proposition One Committee; Betsy Rivard/GA WAND; Jeni Knack/Parents Against Santa Susana Field Laboratory; Glenn Carrol/Nuclear Watch South.]

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability just concluded its first in-person Fall Meeting since 2019 (the 2020-2023 Fall Meetings were held virtually, online, due to the pandemic). The 2024 ANA Fall Meeting was hosted by the African American women-led Georgia WAND in Atlanta on December 3 and 4.

WAND was founded by Helen Caldicott, who is also Beyond Nuclear’s founding president. Caldicott also revived PSR in the 1980s, which then went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize that decade. The executive director of PSR National, Brian Campbell, as well as PSR National board of directors member Ann Suellentrop, attended ANA Fall Meeting 2024. So too did Alfred Meyer, former PSR National board member, who still serves on the boards of PSR WI and PSR NY.

ANA Fall Meeting 2024 was followed by a December 5th tour of the Savannah River Site (SRS) nuclear weapons complex in Aiken, South Carolina, just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. 16 ANA Fall Meeting participants took part in the tour, including Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps. The tour was conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The cooling tower plume from the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia was visible from SRS during the tour — that’s how very close SRS and Vogtle are to each other! Vogtle is now the largest nuclear power plant in the country, both by number of reactors (four), as well as megawattage-electric (each of the four reactor is very large in size).

The Barnwell, South Carolina (James Brown’s hometown!) national “low-level” radioactive waste dump is also nearby SRS. More than three-dozen states dumped “low-level” radioactive waste there for decades on end. The dump has leaked in the past, and still leaks in the present. Future leaks are also nearly certain. Three states still dump “low-level” radioactive waste there.

Not too far away in South Carolina are additional nuclear facilities, including the Summer nuclear power plant, as well as a nuclear fuel fabrication facility.

GA WAND gave presentations during ANA Fall Meeting about the health impacts on the African American majority, rural Burke County, GA, a short distance downstream from SRS. Many households in Burke County are also low-income.

GA WAND also described African American communities in the metro Atlanta area where households pay 30% of their income towards their electricity bills. Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power have put not one cent of skin in the game on Vogtle 3 & 4. Federal taxpayers have put $12 billion (with a B!) of skin in the game, in the form of U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantees. And Georgia ratepayers have put tremendous skin in the game too, on their electric bills, which will continue for a very long time into the future.

As you see, the nuclear injustices in Georgia and South Carolina are severe.

Jeni Knack of ANA member group Parents Against Santa Susana Field Laboratory summed up the tour succinctly: “a total greenwash.” She was specifically referring to the “radioactive petting zoo” at the very end of the tour, but her words well described the entire experience, actually. SRS’s ecology lab personnel trotted out numerous reptiles and amphibians of various species, as well as an owl — all very beautiful creatures indigenous to the biologically diverse SRS — but refused to answer any questions about the contamination, exposure, or somatic/genetic harm suffered by the animals, at the severely radioactively and toxic chemically contaminated, sprawling Savannah River Site, which reportedly comprises 1% of the entire State of South Carolina’s land area.

The ANA tour participants stopped on the way out, to take a group photo at the front entrance (see above). They held the flags of 77 countries which have ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

SRS will be a major epicenter of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal’s “modernization,” “renovation,” and expansion, if DOE, NNSA, the nuclear industry, and their backers in the White House and Congress, get their way, at a cost to American taxpayers of nearly $2 trillion (with a T!) over three decades. SRS would host a brand new nuclear weapons plutonium pit production facility, for example. The scheme is pouring gasoline on the fire of a new nuclear arms race with Russia, China, and other nuclear-armed countries, of course.

The fight is very much on. ANA member groups SRS Watch in SC, and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, have filed lawsuits against expanded pit production at Los Alamos National Lab in NM, and brand new pit production at SRS in SC.

Ironically, the SRS pit production would be housed in the abandoned Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), a more than $7 billion waste of federal taxpayer money by DOE. The MFFF was supposed to covert weapons grade plutonium, excess to military needs, into commercial nuclear power plant reactor fuel. But the MFFF building was too small for the equipment needed to be installed inside of it!

An ANA tour participant asked the SRS tour guide to explain how the former, so-called “swords into plowshares” plan at the MFFF had been reversed, into a “plowshares into swords” plan at the weapons plutonium pit production facility. NNSA/DOE’s SRS tour guide responded that SRS has a job to do, and is good at it.

Certainly SRS did not do a good job at converting “swords into plowshares” at the MFFF!

ANA is a four-decade old, national network of around three-dozen organizations, addressing issues of nuclear weapons production, nuclear power, radioactive waste, and radioactive contamination clean up.

Beyond Nuclear joined ANA as one of its very first acts after its founding in 2007. Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps, has served on ANA’s board of directors for the past four years, including as president for the past year. He has reached his ANA board term-limit, and so has rotated off.