31 years ago today, I was testifying before then-Reps. Al Gore, Jr. and Marilyn Lloyd about the Oak Ridge Y-12 Nuclear Weapon Plant mercury pollution. I was honored to testify before Al Gore at his July 11, 1983 hearing on the Oak Ridge mercury pollution crisis, which was a classified secret (kept even from President Jimmy Carter and President Reagan according to their Presidential libraries).
That's the way it was, until our tiny Appalachian Observer weekly newspaper's FOIA and declassification request was granted by DOE on May 17, 1983. Gore swore in all the witnesses, conducting an investigative hearing. Yet no one ever went to prison or jail for even a day for putting 4.2 million pounds of mercury into local creeks and groundwater, and into workers’ lungs and brains, without signs, fences, respirators, warnings or basic protections. Half the free world’s mercury was in Oak Ridge: Union Carbide and the Atomic Energy Commission and successor agencies “LOST” 10% OF IT.
Years after the hearings and billions were spent on cleanup, mercury levels are rising.
Thanks to activists and U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), DOE will in a few years spend another $125 million to keep mercury from entering East Fork Poplar Creek, which is still being contaminated daily by mercury that is still leaching out from the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant.
In 1977, I was a 20 year old staffer for Senator Jim Sasser, assigned to cover as a legislative research assistant the creation of the Department of Energy under President Carter, among other issues. We had no idea at that time what DOE had done to Tennesseans and other Americans. No one but DOE knew that.
Six years later, the mercury losses in Oak Ridge were declassified on May 17, 1983, at my request. The Al Gore hearing followed. Other disclosures around the country, sought by activists from all walks of life, have shown the Nation a picture of sublime ugliness: the Cold War took tens of thousands of Americans as unwilling victims, without informed consent. Now we know all too well that our Nation faces a moral crisis involving DOE, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” one that will test who we are as a people.
The DOE Nuclear Weapons complex, to paraphrase Lincoln, is guilty of “idolatry that practices human sacrifices.” DOE’s American victims must be compensated fully, fairly and swiftly. It may be cleaned up by the year 2047, at which time I will be 90 years young.
Cleanup of the entire nuclear weapons complex may eventually be achieved for as little as $400 billion. In the immortal words of the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.), "A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."
I went on to Memphis State University Law School, clerkships with the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges, work at the AFL-CIO Occupational Health Legal Rights Foundation and Government Accountability Project and private practice. I was honored to represent environmental and nuclear and trucking whistleblowers, across America, only to have my license taken in retaliation for zealous advocacy for workers.
Today, I am waiting for the Levin College of Law University of Florida to respond re: my fifth application to its Environmental and Land Use Planning Law (ELUPL) LL.M. program. I have been filed age, disability and retaliation complaints against the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, which refuses to meet or interview me. Yesterday, an Assistant Vice President at the University of Florida e-mailed PDF copies of my 49 letters of recommendation to some two dozen people outside the University, including the New York Times, local newspapers, et al. (I had first asked UF for the file and age data in 2010 and again some 26 days ago. This massive distribution of my educational records by UF (15.7 MB worth) would appear to violate federal protections for student and applicant privacy. I await an explanation, and my admission to UF's high-calibre environmental law graduate program.
In the immortal words of the soccer cheer invented some 15 years ago by an African-American Naval Academy midshipman, a current over-30 Memphis law student: "I believe that we will win."
We shall overcome!
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