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There is the old expression “A picture is worth a thousand words."

The following pictures offer an example of the environmental justice issues at stake in the nuclear industry effort to expand the Grand Gulf nuclear power station for the possible construction of new reactors.  Grand Gulf nuclear station is located in Claiborne County, Mississippi which is 84% African American with 32 % living at or below the poverty line.

Because of a uniquely discriminatory Mississippi State Tax Code legislatively enacted in 1988, Claiborne County property tax revenue from the nuclear station was re-appropriated to more than 40 other Mississippi counties in Entergy’s electricity distribution area. The peculiar tax code act was applied only to nuclear power in Mississippi, no other electrical generation facilities and their county directed revenues were impacted.

Claiborne County does not have adequate revenues to maintain its emergency planning infrastructure, including police, fire department and county hospital services to respond to a potential accident or terrorist attack at Grand Gulf nuclear power station

An excerpted page from the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station Emergency Public Information Brochure 2004, Port Gibson, Mississippi, identifies the roads in the ten-mile emergency planning zone designated as evacuation routes.  Bald Hill Road is depicted in the civil defense brochure as an operable evacuation route in the event of nuclear accident at Grand Gulf.

NIRS photograph taken in 2004 of a section of Bald Hill Road, Port Gibson, Mississippi that while designated by Grand Gulf Nuclear Station as an operable evacuation route, a section of the road approximately the length of a football field just south of the Unit 1 has been washed out along with its bridge for three years because of the lack of county repair funds. Contrary to the 2004 Claiborne County civil defense plan for Grand Gulf nuclear power station Bald Hill Road is not useable as an evacuation route, possibly cutting off prompt evacuation of residents south of the reactor and the back door for the 700 nuclear workers at Grand Gulf.