Established by colonizers in 1777, Burke County, Georgia was ultimately developed by enslaved laborers who made the area one of the main cotton-producing regions of the south before the Civil War. Shell Bluff is a rural, farming-class community in Burke County whose current population is 51 percent Black and living downwind and downstream from the Savannah River Site (SRS), a nuclear weapons plant across the Savannah River, and nuclear power Plant Vogtle, which is currently expanding from two to four working reactors.
Georgia WAND began tracking activities and found that SRS and Vogtle have been contaminating the community’s groundwater for decades. Tritium and plutonium production and radioactive waste dumped in unlined trenches at SRS, coupled with regular waste releases at Vogtle, contributed to the toxification of Shell Bluff which has been called, “Georgia’s own Flint water crisis.”
We approach our work in Burke County i.e. Shell Bluff using an intersectional analysis grounded in the experience of working-class women of color. This approach is critical to a region steeped in a history of exploitation and neglect. Communities of color are shouldering the brunt of public health and environmental impacts of the energy industry’s reckless and harmful practices. Access to clean drinking water is not just a privilege for the wealthy - it’s a basic human right.
Learn more about water pollution in southern Georgia:
Burke County residents deserve more than nuclear jargon education.
Environmental Racism: Is nuclear power plant for poor Black residents of Shell Bluff, GA?
In 2010, CNN aired a report about the concerns Shell Bluff residents had about the expansion of Plant Vogtle and the impact of nuclear waste on their health.
“Contaminants found in Georgia’s drinking water supplies, like arsenic, mercury, radiological contaminants, and other pollutants are a risk to our health – especially children that are already sick,” - Yolanda Whyte, M.D., Atlanta pediatrician
Georgia Adopt-A-Stream encourages individuals and communities to monitor and/or improve sections of streams, wetlands, lakes or estuaries through several types of involvement.
“Women and girls are disproportionately affected by radiological contamination. Shell Bluff, in Burke County, Georgia, USA, is unique because it is the only community in the country that has a nuclear weapons plant and a nuclear power plant in such close proximity.” - excerpt from: Gender Equity and the Full Realization of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation in the United States
