Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear Plants

Abstract

Abstract

The mining, fuel enrichment-fabrication, and waste-management stages of the US commercial nuclear-fuel cycle have been documented as involving environmental injustices affecting, respectively, indigenous uranium miners, nuclear workers, and minorities and poor people living near radioactive-waste storage facilities. After surveying these three environmental-injustice problems, the article asks whether US nuclear-reactor siting also involves environmental injustice. For instance, because high percentages of minorities and poor people live near the proposed Vogtle reactors in Georgia, would siting new reactors at the Vogtle facility involve environmental injustice? If so, would this case be an isolated instance of environmental injustice, or is the apparent Georgia inequity generally representative of environmental injustice associated with nuclear-reactor siting throughout the US? Providing a preliminary answer to these questions, the article uses census data, paired t-tests, and z-tests to compare each state's percentages of minorities and poor people to the percentages living in zip codes and census tracts having commercial reactors. Although further studies are needed to fully evaluate apparent environmental injustices, preliminary results indicate that, while reactor-siting-related environmental injustice is not obvious at the census-tract level (perhaps because census tracts are designed to be demographically homogenous), zipcode-scale data suggest reactor-related environmental injustice may threaten poor people (p < 0.001), at least in the southeastern United States.