Southern Downwinders: The historical intersection between Nuclear and Climate Injustices and the Nuclear Industry in the Atomic South

• In Event: Gender and Queer Analytics in Environmental History

Abstract

In 2017, women members of one of Georgia’s oldest anti-nuclear organization, Women’s Actions for New Directions (GA WAND) and biologist Mary Olson of Nuclear Information Resources (NIRS) Southeast published an urgent report exposing the dangers posed to Southern communities by nuclear facilities due to climate change. For over five decades, the South has served as a nuclear hub for nuclear weapons manufacturing and research, nuclear energy reactors, and nuclear waste facilities and was the only region building new nuclear reactors. Because of its unique geographical and topographic features, the region’s aging nuclear infrastructure proved particularly vulnerable to the perils of climate change. Throughout the late 20th and 21st centuries, the Southern states “endured some of the costliest weather and energy-related events.” Additionally, decades of exposure from nuclear facilities created generations of “Southern downwinders,” or atomic communities adversely impacted by toxic and radiological exposures. Armed with epidemiological evidence and engaged in citizen-science Southern women organized coalitions to inform the public about the adverse effects of living and working near Southern nuclear facilities, increasingly focusing on the dangers imperiling “Southern downwinders” because of climate change.
Conversely, the nuclear industry has courted American women to support and endorse its products as clean for American families. In the 1990s, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), one of the most powerful nuclear lobbying organizations, began spending billions of dollars marketing nuclear energy as clean and safe to gain support among women, historically suspicious of the notoriously, secretive industry.

This presentation explores this complicated interplay and juxtaposes Southern women’s anti-nuclear organizations public awareness campaigns linking nuclear and climate injustices in Southern communities with the NEI’s marketing campaign branding nuclear energy as clean. It also illuminates the hidden atomic legacies of the American Southeast, as well as the history of Southern women’s anti-nuclear, environmental, and anti-secrecy activism

Author

• Aubrey Underwood, Clark Atlanta University