By Sara Tansey
Jenkinsville, SC

For months, community members in Jenkinsville, SC, have been meeting, organizing, and growing more vocal about their frustrations with the local utility that wants to build two more reactors in a community that already hosts one unit. So when I spoke with community members who were itching to move beyond just organizing to Nuclear Regulatory Commission deadlines, we set a date two Tuesdays from that Sunday. At the time, I didn’t realize that was the Tuesday of my 21st birthday. When it hit me, I knew it was going to be perfect.

So last night, we met at the local park, proudly owned and operated by the same utility that owns and operates the nuclear facility in Jenkinsville. It boasts a “scenic view,” and it sure is a view. Down by the water’s edge are covered picnic tables, a bit of beach for the locals to enjoy, a fishing dock and right across the water sits VC Summer. Beautiful!

We gathered around one of the picnic tables, enjoyed the summer weather and a cooling breeze off of the lake. And as we — community leaders, youth activists and other no-nuke activists — plotted how to stop two more reactors from being built in this community, we pulled strength and determination from the vision of devastation that lay across the water.

A vision of economic and human health devastation. SCE&G has stated in their own environmental report that less than 10 percent of new jobs will go to residents of the county, let alone the surrounding community, and that they do not expect any economic stimulation for the Jenkinsville area as a result of expansion.

Furthermore, cancer rates have increased since the introduction of the first reactor, and many local residents live off of the land. They have home gardens, fish from the lake and rivers and hunt local game to feed their families.

So sharing that community and mutual passion, creating next steps and a plan we all worked on together, knowing that we were organizing to do something to humble that boastful and unsuspecting utility that built a park and thought their contributions to the community ended there, was the best 21st birthday gift I could have asked for. Knowing that each one of us sitting around that picnic table was determined with our lives to stop this proposed expansion gave me goosebumps that I blamed on the water’s winds and that, in this southern heat today, I cannot excuse away.

To learn more about the community organizing efforts in Jenkinsville, email Sara Tansey at Sara@climateaction.net and stay tuned!