Lawyers' Committee Joins Legal Battle to Oppose the Siting of Uranium Enrichment Facility in African American Community in Louisiana

In 1994, the Lawyers' Committee entered a case involving the proposed siting of a privately- owned uranium enrichment facility in northern Louisiana. Louisiana Energy Services or LES applied for a 30-year license to construct and operate the Claiborne Enrichment Facility.

If licensed, the facility would be built between two unincorporated African American communities, Center Springs and Forest Grove. Forest Grove (population 150) was founded by freed slaves at the close of the Civil War. Center Springs (population 100) was founded around the turn of the century. Both are 97% African American. A large portion of the land holdings are still within the families that founded the communities.

An appeal of the proposed permit was initiated by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund on behalf of intervenors Citizens Against Nuclear Trash or CANT. The Lawyers' Committee provided assistance in the preparation of CANT's argument. The Lawyers' Committee developed arguments that the National Environmental Policy Act, as well as Executive Order 12898, the Environmental Justice executive order, required the Federal government to determine whether LES's environmental impact statement considered the racial impacts in the siting process.

The Committee's research uncovered that at each stage of the process, potential sites considered by the company contained increasingly higher and higher percentages of African American residents in the area, until the actual site chosen included neighborhoods with the highest percentage of African Americans. Depositions and other trial discovery revealed further information pointing to a site selection process that was predetermined to choose a minority community.

In May 1997, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board denied the license on environmental justice grounds. (In the Matter of Louisiana Energy Services, L.P. (Claiborne Enrichment Center), Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, LBP-97-8, Docket No. 70-3070-ML (May 1, 1997)). Resting its decision largely on the environmental justice executive order, the Board found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Staff's NEPA review of the facility inadequate on two grounds: (1) it failed to investigate thoroughly the possibility that "racial considerations" affected the facility's siting; and (2) it failed to account fully for the facility's "disparate impact" on two nearby African-American communities. The Board emphasized "statistical evidence" suggesting possible racial bias in the siting process and LES's decision to reject a largely white site near a lake.

In an appeal of the Board decision, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or NRC stated that NEPA is not a civil rights law calling for full scale racial discrimination litigation in NRC licensing proceedings and reversed the Board's requirement of an inquiry into racial discrimination in siting. However, the NRC upheld the Board's decision that the Environmental Impact Statement failed to adequately consider the impact of relocating of a road and the impact on property values. (In the Matter of Louisiana Energy Services, L.P. (Claiborne Enrichment Center), Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CLI-98-3, Docket No. 70-3070-ML (April 3, 1998)). The NRC stated that the "disparate impact" analysis is the principal tool for advancing environmental justice under NEPA. It also stated that the NRC's goal is to identify and adequately weigh, or mitigate, effects on low-income and minority communities that become apparent only by considering factors peculiar to those communities.

The issues were sent back to the NRC staff to resolve pursuant to the decision, but LES no longer pursued its permit application. According to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earthjustice), this marked the first time the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied a permit based on citizen-group objections.

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