The 1997 NRC board overturned a uranium permit on Bullard’s discrimination statistics

Evidence

Bullard’s documentation was recognized in a 1997 decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which overturned a facility’s permit. In an administrative appeal to block the siting of a uranium enrichment facility in a poor and African American area of Louisiana, Professor Bullard successfully argued that racism more than likely played a significant part in the selection process. Bullard demonstrated (through a statistical analysis) that at each progressively narrower stage of the company’s site selection process, the level of poverty and African Americans in the local population rose dramatically until it culminated in the selection of a site whose a local population is extremely poor and 97 percent African American. The race-neutral siting criteria— including the criteria of low population and the need to site the facility five miles from institutions such as schools, hospitals, and nursing homes—operated in conjunction with the current racial segregation and the resulting inferior infrastructure (e.g., lack of adequate schools, road paving, water supply) to ensure that the location selected would be a poor community of color. The NRC’s licensing board, on the basis of Bullard’s evidence, overturned the facility’s permit and directed the NRC staff to conduct a “thorough and in-depth investigation” of the site selection process and to determine whether “the selection process was tainted by racial bias.” In doing so, it ordered the staff to “lift some rocks and look under them” because racial discrimination is “rarely, if ever, admitted” and is “often rationalized under some other seemingly racially neutral guise, making it difficult to ferret out,” and “direct evidence of racial discrimination is rarely found.” — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 366

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off chapter 3’s claim that Bullard’s documentation caused denial of a Louisiana nuclear waste permit — this supplies the full administrative-bench details and the ‘narrowing-pool’ statistical method. — connects to: The Executive Order drove the NRC’s first-ever permit denial over racial siting fairness — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 712; Bullard’s documentation of racial bias caused denial of a Louisiana nuclear waste permit — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 149
• SEED: The ‘lift some rocks and look under them’ administrative technique for ferreting out deniable discrimination is an angle for examining how evidence standards differ between courts and administrative boards.