In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, a crew of Asheville-area activists pick up momentum for their anti-nuke cause.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

If you drove by the Grey Eagle in West Asheville a few weeks back, you might have seen the usual suspects out front—folk singers, drummers and various pickers—headed into the music hall with their instruments. But if it was one particular Wednesday evening, you might have also spotted some activists out front, surrounded by samba dancers and carrying signs that read: “Nuke-Free WNC?” and “No Drive-By Nukes!”

That’s because the Mountain Protectors, a group formed in January, has been trying to get the word out lately about a particular nuclear issue. Namely, they’re concerned about nuclear waste being transported by truck along I-26 and I-40. It could be headed, some of them speculate, towards Sandy Mush, an area that begins in northwest Buncombe County and was singled out as a potential nuclear waste dump in the 1980s.

Last January, President Obama assembled a Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which includes professors, former lawmakers and industry representatives, to meet and discuss the group’s stated mission of “restarting America’s nuclear industry.” In essence, says Mary Olson, who runs the Southeast office of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, they’re talking about how to dispose of nuclear waste. The BRC met this January in Augusta, Georgia, the only planned meeting in the Southeast. So 34 Asheville-area activists, including several from the Asheville chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, chartered a bus and went to the meeting. What they heard shocked them. Basically, says Olson—who runs the NIRS operation out of her West Asheville home—South Carolina businessmen raised their hands to say they’d accept and recycle nuclear waste at a sprawling facility in Aiken, South Carolina.

The commission will weigh in on nuclear waste disposal by late May or early June, Olson says. In the meantime, Mountain Protectors has been holding fundraisers like the April bash at Grey Eagle, other benefits at churches and bookstores, and weekly potlucks at Olson’s house to organize email and letter-writing campaigns. “We’re not pre-judging what the Blue Ribbon Commission report will say,” she says, explaining that it could be a decade before anyone sees an actual plan. “What we’re doing is preventative medicine here… We don’t have a crystal ball. But if you want a crystal ball, look at how much money they’ve put into I-26. It’s that kind of circumstantial evidence that makes some of us shake in our boots.”

What’s helped the activists’ case recently is the fact that a magnitude-9 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan in March triggered a nuclear disaster worse than Chernobyl. A tsunami caused by the earthquake crashed into the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which disabled the plant’s emergency cooling generators. Four nuclear reactors in meltdown (there was only one at Chernobyl) meant significant amounts of radiation were released into the air, which led to widespread evacuations and scares about serious radiation levels in the water and food surrounding the plant.

Back home, it’s led to all sorts of radiation fears. By the end of March, just as FDA officials found small amounts of radioactive iodine in milk in California and Washington, scientists found low levels of radiation in North Carolina. Duke Energy said it detected low levels of iodine 131 at all three of its North Carolina nuclear stations, including the McGuire nuclear plant just outside of Charlotte. In his report for the Asheville Citizen-Times in March, Joel Burgess found that Western North Carolinians were making pharmacy runs for potassium iodide pills, which are used to treat radiation exposure.

Olson, who’s been an activist for 18 years and spent eight of them lobbying about nuclear issues on Capitol Hill, says no one should start swallowing potassium iodide. First of all, it’s only effective for high concentrations of radioactive iodine. If you’re near a reactor that melts down in the U.S., that’s a good time to have potassium iodide handy. Second, some people are deathly allergic to the pills and don’t know it, so there’s absolutely no reason to take the pills preemptively.

Still, Olson, who keeps a Geiger counter in her house, says there’s no question that a disaster like the one at Fukushima will release more radioactive material into the earth’s atmosphere, which undoubtedly increases the risk of cancer wherever it lands. “It’s a numbers game,” she says. What she’s also learned after her years of research on radiation, she says, is that women are more susceptible to cancers from radiation exposure than men—50 percent more susceptible, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a statistic that rattled her when she first learned it. “Reproductive tissue is simply more sensitive, and 50 percent is a lot more,” she says. “I don’t want to genderize something. In this case, everybody should be concerned.”

So what precautions does she recommend? Well, not gathering rainwater for drinking water, since trace amounts of radioactivity will be carried by weather systems across the Pacific. Don’t eat big fish like tuna, she says, since the food chain is so good at concentrating contaminants in the largest animal.

In the big picture, Olson doesn’t feel that Western North Carolinians’ health will be threatened by the Fukushima disaster. But she and other members of Mountain Protectors do think locals’ health will be impacted by tons of nuclear waste rolling up I-26 in trucks. “This is so close to home,” says Monica Tilhou, a volunteer with the group. “When we put ourselves in danger of a nuclear accident, the risk that we’re incurring here locally is far greater than the risk of Fukushima. It’s a frightening thing, to think that we could be a terrible highway accident away from those sorts of scenarios.”

With the commission’s report looming, Mountain Protectors are holding a few more fundraisers and events this month to try and get Ashevilleans to email the federal group. On May 3, Hendersonville author Kenneth Butcher will read from his book The Middle of the Air, a novel about a mountain community that’s outraged over nuclear radiation being trucked through their area, so they hijack a vehicle. “We’re not endorsing it as a campaign tactic,” Olson says, though the novel is where the name Mountain Protectors comes from. “We just want to give people who share our concerns a chance to participate.”

For more information, check out www.nirs.org.