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Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Caroline Payton about her book titled Radioactive Dixie A Nuclear History of the American south, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025. Now, a very simple fact makes it really clear why a nuclear history of the American south would be necessary and interesting, which is that the American south contains nuclear reactors than any other part of the US And a whole bunch of the country's radioactive waste. That fact alone means we kind of have a lot of questions to answer in terms of how did this happen, what sorts of impacts it's had on the people that live there, and kind of everything else that's going around in the region. Given that, obviously it kind of sounds like in a lot of places you are going to be living near a nuclear reactor, and it's going to have some sort of impact on kind of everything about your life and work and all sorts of things. So let us discuss. Caroline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:11]
C
Thanks for having me.
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B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:19]
C
Sure. So, again, my name is Caroline Payton, and I'm an Associate professor of teaching in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. And what inspired me to write the book? Well, fundamentally, it started as a dissertation, and I was a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, and I was really searching for a dissertation topic like so many of us have to do. And I was trying to figure out what novel angle I could possibly have about the history of the American South. And, you know, there are typically kind of a few trajectories you might go down if you decide to study the history of the US South. And somewhat by accident, I was doing some research at the South Carolina political collections for a professor at another university. And while I was working on his research topic, I started to come across all of this great archival material in those political collections related to our controversies about the nuclear industry in South Carolina specifically. And I knew a little bit about the South's nuclear history before this point, mostly related to Oak Ridge, but I had no idea how big this was in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in South Carolina. But elsewhere. And once I started to connect the dots, I thought, wow, this could become a dissertation topic and. And hopefully a book.
- [03:58]
B
Fair enough. Always interesting when one goes about searching to kind of see what sort of pops up. So glad for my sake at least, that you ended up with this topic, because now we get to talk about it, starting, I think, with the title, right. Radioactive Dixie. When and why did the south as a place where there was so much sort of nuclear energy start?
- [04:19]
C
The origin point of Radioactive Dixie, I would say, although I'm sure there's some point, maybe you could push it back even further, maybe in terms of research or one figure or another at a university perhaps. But really the basic origin point is you have the construction of the top secret facility Clinton engineer works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II, where you primarily had uranium enrichment occur for the top secret program to develop an atomic bomb. And from there, you know, you have really a series of installations devoted to nuclear weapons production in South Carolina with the Savannah river plant, and then in Kentucky as well with the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant. And so by the time you get to the early 1950s, you have three major sites that will become instrumental for the production of nuclear weapons in the United States. States. And then the broader story from there is not just that the south becomes tied to the production of nuclear weapons. And that was eagerly sought by officials and politicians in the south and a variety of figures both at Oak Ridge and at universities like the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and elsewhere, but from There you also just see this incredible enthusiasm for how else could we expand the nuclear industry in the South? And I think in the book, that's really what I try to focus on. Not so much sites like Oak Ridge, which have been written about fairly extensively, and the Savannah river plant as well, but these other parts of the South's nuclear history, which we're less familiar with. And so I found it fascinating that at, say, North Carolina State University, you have the first on campus research reactor, and they developed the nation's first nuclear engineering program. You have these really incredible programs like the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, which worked in conjunction, excuse me, with SRS in South Carolina. And so suddenly you have, you know, Eugene Odom, one of the nation's foremost specialists in ecology, who are starting to, in many ways use those connections to, say, the Atomic Energy Commission to build these research programs in the South. And so you have both the kind of military angle, but then you also have all of these universities in the south who really viewed this as an opportunity, particularly because the Atomic Energy Commission would fund. It would fund experimental reactors, it could help finance the acquisition of equipment and the creation of these programs. And for a long time, you know, many of these universities had been viewed as kind of relative backwaters. If you wanted to study physics or you wanted to have some sort of career in science and engineering, you. You would have potentially gone elsewhere. And so you have people who basically become nuclear boosters in the south from a variety of different backgrounds that, that see this as a grand opportunity. And. And so by the time you get into the 1950s and 1960s, you just have a variety of institutions which are thoroughly invested in the nuclear industry, both in terms of its commercial potential, but also in terms of the dimensions related to research. And then, of course, nuclear weapons production, all of this is intersecting and overlapping. And so as we move through the 1940s and 1950s, there's just a lot of enthusiasm that, hey, this is really a great opportunity for this, you know, in terms of a region and what it might bring both to our institutions and to our economy. And this is building on a much longer thread in Southern history, you know, this New south boosterism, which goes, you know, back to the late 19th century, post civil War. And so I found it fascinating that particularly for politicians and for advocates of the nuclear industry in the south, they really framed it in that language too, that this is an opportunity, this is maybe an equalizer, potentially even economic emancipation for the South. And we really need to get ahead of other places and promote the industry and so you had a lobbying organization basically, that still exists, although by a different name today, the Southern Interstate Nuclear Board, which coordinated efforts across the state. State worked as a liaison with federal agencies, with state agencies. And this will help spur a whole host of programs, both at the state level and in coordination with the federal government basically, to promote the nuclear industry in the South. And so there you basically have the origin points. I mean, there are so many different figures and institutions that play a part. But, yeah, in the 1940s and 1950s, there's really just a kind of aggressive promotion and expansion in the South.
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B
Yeah, that definitely gives us a sense. Obviously, I'm not going to ask you to read the entire chapter out here, but that gives us an idea of kind of. When we're talking about, and crucially, these incentives and the kinds of actors who are involved in this happening, is there anything further we can understand about what these first few decades of development were like and sort of what was happening technologically and politically with this expansion?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think particularly in terms of the commercial side of the industries, really the pivotal decade, I would argue, would be the 1960s. Not only do you simply have the promotion of the kind of commercial dimensions of the industry, how can we expand this? And so you start to see people both promote and seek out new opportunities. And so in the south, some of this comes in the form of the radioactive waste disposal industry, the commercial side of that. And so I focus on two different sites. I won't get into all the details now, but one in Kentucky and then one in South Carolina. And then, of course, you have a lot of enthusiasm by roughly the late 1960s about the possibility of. Of commercial nuclear power. And the south is really ripe in many ways for the sighting of nuclear power reactors from a certain perspective, simply because of its environment, with some exceptions, you know, it's generally not a very seismically active region. Again, with a few exceptions, there's lots of water. The terrain is generally fairly hospitable to the sighting of nuclear power reactors. And so there's a real sense that there's an opportunity there. And once you have power companies in the south, particularly tva, the Tennessee Valley Authority, get behind nuclear power, this spurs a kind of blitz. You know, it's a nuclear licensing spree where a number of power companies in the south have big plans, big plans to build, you know, these kind of huge plants with a number of different reactor units. Most of those plans get scaled back over time by the 70s and 1980s, but that's kind of like the pivotal turning point, once companies believe that this is commercially viable and also just technologically, much more possible with some changes in how these plants could. Could be built in terms of the design and the application of that and the construction, once that all seems to be much more realistic and people kind of buy into that template, then you do have this kind of blitz. And so that in many ways is like the next part. And it's so much of what I focus on in the book is once people, we go from the abstract to. To suddenly like the tangible of this plant is being built in your community or nearby. And that, again, it kind of galvanizes people to ask questions and to kind of consider what this might mean for their community.
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B
Yeah. So let's get into some of those places in more detail. So, for instance, if we compare the sites that you look at in Mississippi and Louisiana, or what sorts of impacts do we see when we've got kind of a power plant coming up? And then obviously there's all sorts of things that are kind of already there in terms of politics, race, class, and then those things are also shaped by these big plants turning up. So what sorts of similarities and differences do we see between these two sites?
- [14:03]
C
So I would say one of the big similarities between the history surrounding the Waterford unit in Louisiana, so near New Orleans, and then the Grand Gulf plant, which is in Claiborne county in Mississippi. So, you know, number one, these are both plants that are situated on the Mississippi river. And in both of these states, you know, the Post World War II era and across the south more generally, there is this, you know, there's this big push for really any and all development. And the. The backbone of that is supposed to be cheap and plentiful power. And nuclear power is going to, you know, in the grand vision is going to play an important role in that. And in both of these states, you see, the industry is incentivized quite a bit, maybe more so even in Louisiana. And so I think, you know, you have that similarity. You know, ultimately these plants are operated today by Entergy, so the same company. And so there is, you know, there's a whole nother complicated story just about what happens in the power industry in the United States there. But. And in both cases, I think outside observers have a lot of questions about the safety of these plants. In states where there's generally not been a great emphasis upon regulation, there's been great incentives to develop industry and maybe not always ask the questions necessary, particularly of any technology that's like high risk or industry that might be high risk. And so I think part of what happens in the 70s, the 1970s and 1980s is that you have these plants, and in both the state of Louisiana and in the state of Mississippi, you have a number of people who are quite skeptical about the ability of these plants to be constructed properly, to be run properly, and to be regulated effectively. And in the case of the Waterford plant outside of New Orleans in St. Charles Parish, you know, this is at the center of just an area that has a lot of industrial development. It has hazardous industry. You know, there's just. There's a context there of industrial accidents, of, of a kind of series, both of environmental hazards. You know, the most obvious example being hurricanes and floods. And. And so people were in many ways already on edge, on high alert and wondering about the safety of the plant itself as it's under construction. And so in both the case of Waterford and in the Grand Gulf history, you also, I mean, this is the era of, I would call it, great investigative journalism. And so you have lots of reporters kind of on the ground digging up dirt and asking questions, looking into the construction, any sort of mishap, misstep. And I think generally speaking, the public was fairly well informed about all of the ups and downs of the construction of really any nuclear plant at this time. And so people are concerned, understandably so. And so I think you have that, that similarity as well. In the case of Grand Gulf, I would say, so much of the big themes in Southern history become even more pronounced. Claiborne county, where the plant is sited and operates today, is a predominantly African American community. And it's a community that has dealt with poverty and all of the other, you know, all of the other elements of Southern history right from, you know, just, just to get into. We can't get into all the details here, but this is a community that's been rocked by the history of racial oppression and segregation. And. And then, you know, the seismic changes that are. Are brought about through the civil rights movement. And then you have a plant that is under construction there. And people did have, you know, mixed feelings. Some people thought, look, we need any sort of development we can get. You know, this is going to bring tax revenue to our community. This will, you know, be an important source of tax revenue for a place that hasn't seen much economic development, this could be really positive. And then you had other people who asked really hard questions about the regulation, the safety, you know, is this plant being cited in Claiborne county because, you know, our lives are not valued as much. And so, you know, it sets off these really important and interesting debates both about risk, about equity, and it intersects with this much longer history. And so I think in both places you have those conversations happening. And you know, I found the Waterford plant really interesting in Louisiana too, because you have people who were kind of looking at both what's happened in the 1960s with say, Hurricane Betsy and thinking about risk, both in terms of natural disasters, but also industrial risk, the risk associated with the nuclear industry. And they were asking tough questions about what are the plants, what happens if we have an accident and what happens if there is potentially some sort of natural disaster, how will this impact the plant? So I found those conversations really fascinating, in part because I think they're so relevant even for today, but also because they tell us a lot about some of these longer threads in the history of the American South.
- [20:58]
B
Well, certainly these concerns about what if there's an accident very much remain relevant today and beyond these two particular sites. So let's talk maybe about a place where kind of some things do happen. So what happened, for instance, at Maxi Flats and why isn't this a story maybe that we remember?
- [21:18]
C
So, Maxi Flats, the Maxi Flats disposal site is located in Fleming County, Kentucky. And this was a commercial low level radioactive waste site. So we have, you know, our different categories of radioactive waste from from high level to. To low level. And this site operated from 1963 to 1977. And it becomes a model basically for how to not operate a radioactive waste disposal site. It was situated on a plateau in an area that receives a fairly high amount of annual precipitation. And then one of the misconceptions people might have, in part because the disposal industry today is, I would argue it's pretty well regulated. There's lots of transparency. There's a lot, you know, it's the industry itself, at least on that side, I think, has transformed quite a bit. But in the case of Maxi Flats, you know, you have Kentucky was what's called an agreement. State and Southern states really pushed this, that you basically you have an agreement between states and the federal government that you will help regulate these various nuclear sites and nuclear materials and so forth, just to kind of frame it simply. And so part of what's happening is that at this Maxi Flats disposal site, in theory it's a low level radioactive waste site, but they were in fact accepting high level waste and state authorities, you know, a lot of the oversight was really in practice left to them based on all of the available materials. I've, I've looked At and. And so for nearly over a decade, this site, with a private operator, was accepting a whole host of different types of radioactive materials. And then the disposal process practices were just incredibly shoddy. So sometimes waste was simply being disposed of in unlined trenches. I mean, nothing like how it's disposed of today, even at a low level site. And this, you know, eventually aroused suspicion amongst the community there. And this is, you know, in a fairly rural part of Kentucky. And it spawned grassroot activism with the community itself, itself. But. And they really, you know, you have a combination of some state health officials, some journalists, people in the community who start to bring some attention to the site and are, you know, curious about what's going on. And this eventually brings about the intervention, both from seeing state officials quite belatedly, but also the epa. And I think Maxi Flats is such an important history that more people should know about because it not only tells us a lot about just kind of evolving knowledge related to disposal practices. Radionuclide migration, in this case, you know, radionuclides were migrating far beyond the trenches. And the EPA comes in and starts to monitor and study the site and they really end up ringing these big alarm bells going, we've got a serious problem here. And so Maxi Flats is so instructive because also I think kind of confirms and validates why you need these kinds of federal agencies to both oversee sites like this and to have that expertise and knowledge and be able to determine what's happening. And it was an absolute mess. No one really even knew what was buried in some of these trenches. And it unleashed this huge problem, incredibly, an incredibly costly situation both for Kentucky and, and, you know, for all of the many people who become entangled in this, it eventually becomes a super fun site and has this long odyssey. But I think that Maxi Flats is, while we do, we have some familiarity with some other sites where you have, you know, similarly complex issues with environmental contamination and, you know, a lack of oversight and regulation. But I think in the case of Maxi Flats, it really shows us how this community that was largely viewed as kind of out of sight, out of mind, they brought their own expertise to bear and applied it. But also it really shows us the importance of this kind of apparatus that exists today, I think in terms of both regulating industry and ensuring that local communities are not so negatively impacted by the presence of hazardous or radioactive wastes, among other things.
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B
Yeah, the sort of tension between the local community and their knowledge of kind of what needs to happen versus the plants shows up in some other places too. And sometimes does get a lot of kind of long standing attention. So can we talk about what happened in South Carolina in the late 1970s and the way in which this sort of local conflict in fact became a national story?
- [27:20]
C
Absolutely. So, I mean, this is really the story in South Carolina in the 1970s, as I, as I've mentioned, was what drew me to this topic more broadly in the first place. And I thought, you know, it just, I, it blew my mind at first. And, and obviously people who were there at the time, I mean, they would remember all of this clearly because this was, you know, these were huge controversies which have in some ways also been forgotten today. So South Carolina really occupied the center of two key debates related to the nuclear industry in the 1970s. The first was about radioactive waste disposal. And of course this is connected to the Maxi Flats story in that you had a few low level radioactive waste disposal sites. I mean, there's, there's another story related to like high level radioactive waste, which I don't deal with as much in my book. I mostly focus on the kind of low level commercial sites in Kentucky and South Carolina. But part of what happens in the 1970s is that because you have all of these problems at places like Maxi Flats and elsewhere, suddenly South Carolinians find themselves to be the primary recipient of these, you know, just huge quantities of low level radioactive waste. And you know, this is. While you could possibly get into like the granular, granular details of like, well, how risky really is low level radioactive waste. This sets off a huge controversy where on the one hand you have the community of Barnwell, South Carolina, where the disposal site is situated. So it's basically, this is right next to the sprawling Savannah river site today, one of the centers really of the nuclear industry and nuclear research in the South. And so you have this commercial site and the community of Barnwell, they will mostly defend this as a positive good for their community. But many others, particularly in the state of South Carolina, they're, they're kind of appalled that they perceive it as like, we've made a deal with the devil here. Now we have, you know, millions of cubic feet of, of radioactive waste being buried in our state. And understandably so they're asking, again, they're asking questions. I know I keep saying that, but it really, I mean that's, that's part of what's going on, especially in the 70s, is no one really knows what are the long term consequences of all of this. And so they're outraged. And I came across just, I mean, a huge quantity of constituent correspondence in South Carolina where you really get a sense of how the public perceived this issue. And so, you know, this does spark a bigger, a bigger conversation about like we've, we have this industry throughout the United States and many places produce some quantity of radioactive waste and how do we dispose of it? And you know, we've hadn't entirely figured that out. That's still a kind of ongoing issue. And so you do see this, this big push in the state of South Carolina both to hold the industry accountable, set up some guardrails, make sure that people are disposing, you know, institutions, agencies and companies which are disposing of waste at this site are paying their fair share. And so that in many ways was critical for, you know, just like looking into the future, you know, when these sites are eventually decommissioned or no longer operating, you, you still have to maintain them. And so people, you know, by the 70s and 80s are, are becoming more and more concerned about that. Not just the short term, but also the long term prospects. And it's fascinating because you have this new class really of governors in the south, both in South Carolina, governors like Richard Riley and elsewhere. You know, I talk about this in the book, you know, Bill Clinton, William Winter, all of these various figures who are entering into these nuclear controversies. And typically they are, you know, they're wading through them, trying to, in some cases, maybe trying to figure out what's the best, you know, like what's most beneficial to them politically, but also I think earnestly sometimes wanting to, to shape policy and, and not just being just like, like totally pro nuclear, like just like not asking questions, not demanding accountability. They view things somewhat differently than the, the pro nuclear boosters of the past. Those still exist. But, and so you have that story, right? And this is happening amidst, you know, the accident at Three Mile Island. And so people's concerns are really heightened at that point. So we have the waste disposal controversy where you have a community that in some ways where the disposal site is situated, they're, they're kind of pro nuclear. They've bound their fortunes to the industry. And then you have a lot of people from the outside who are, who are really concerned. Barnwell is yet again at the center of this in South Carolina because you also had plans for a commercial nuclear reprocessing facility. And you have a growing anti nuclear movement in the 70s, even in the South. And so there was a lot of concern about the industry generally. And this nuclear processing facility becomes a big site of political activism. Activists are very concerned about Nuclear proliferation. They're also using this as a way to kind of protest nuclear weapons as well. And, and so again, you have this situation, this, where you have all these activists descending upon Barnwell, South Carolina to both protest those plans. And then yet another twist occurs because you have a Southerner who has some background in right nuclear field, Jimmy Carter, who comes into the White House and he also kind of diverges from this simple path of nuclear boosterism and finds himself, you know, having to deal with all of these various nuclear controversies. And, and in the case of nuclear reprocessing, he issues, you know, essentially uses his presidential authority to defer those plans. And that's basically the end of the prospects for commercial nuclear reprocessing in the United States. And this infuriates a variety of politicians in the south from figures like Strom Thurmond, because they see Carter as really blocking and Styning some of those plans. And so that's yet another part of this story, really. The fate of certain aspects of the industry all come down to these controversies in South Carolina and then a southerner who becomes president, Jimmy Carter.
- [35:17]
B
And obviously the waste and weapons part of this are really key, as you've described. But we're also seeing, it sounds like from the book, tensions as well over power plants too, nuclear power plants in the sort of late 70s going into the 1980s. So is it the same sorts of tensions and protests around this aspect of the industry too?
- [35:37]
C
I think so, to some extent. You know, the, once some of those plants, the, the plans are announced and you have local communities in the south. And, and I should, I should state that I, you know, I write about some of these places and I had to, you know, I had to pick and choose based on what the archives yielded. And so I wouldn't want to make any generalizations, but from the places that I studied, primarily rural counties in places in the south, you know, there, there were concerns about safety, oftentimes from anti nuclear groups who were maybe coming from like metropolitan areas. So in the case of the plans for TVA's plant in Hartsville, Tennessee, some of the anti nuclear activism came from people within the community, I mean, whose homes were directly across the street basically from the plain site. But a lot of the activism also came from outside, from Nashville, basically the closest major city. And you see that elsewhere in some ways. But I think for those communities too, they had questions about safety that were placed often in a much more kind of local personal context. And they often framed this as we're these rural communities and we're going to supply the power for other places through the presence of this plant. But what, what have these power companies really done for us? You know, what, what are they doing to ensure that we have safe operating plants? That if something does happen, what, what are the plans that are put in place in that regard? And I think they also had these kind of questions as well, particularly in the case of the, the planned site at Hartsville. There's, you know, there's not an, an operating plant there today. TVA ends up canceling that plant after starting construction on it. But I think people in some of these places, particularly somewhere like Hartsville, they also had these deeper questions about, like, how does this change our community fundamentally? Like, once you have the presence of a nuclear power plant there, which not just in terms of the visual, you know, it's just kind of like inescapable, you're always going to be able to see the plant depending on, you know, where, where your vantage point, but also just like, how does this change the place we live in once you've introduced these high risk technologies in such close proximity to us? How does this change our community itself at a kind of fundamental level? And so I think you also have these, these questions that I perhaps could not have anticipated until I got to know some of the people who lived in these communities and could see evidence of this in the archival material. And so I think there were concerns about safety. There's also a big concern just across the south about just the cost of these plants. And I think that really cuts to the heart of this history as well. A lot of this boosterism was really built upon. We're going to have cheap, you know, cheap power. It's going to be plentiful, it's going to spur all of this economic development. And then because of what happens to the American economy in the 1970s and early 1980s, the cost of these plants, you know, they skyrocket. And so then you also have just this backlash because people start to realize, hey, this is going to hit me once I get my utility bill, I am paying for a nuclear plant. And, and, and people start to wonder, well, is this really justified? Do we actually need all of these, you know, monster, right, these huge massive nuclear power plants, you know, at least based on the original plans, a lot of this gets scaled down. But this is part of the equation too. And it's even, it's, it's felt more acutely by the people who are going to end up having to live next to the plant. They, they also Wonder, you know, is this, is this really necessary? And so there, there are kind of a variety of different, different factors. You know, there are, there are other people who support the industry but you know, a lot of people had, had concerns related to safety costs. But also just how does this fundamentally change our, our community, our home? Yeah.
- [40:30]
B
And these questions about kind of what are the benefits of this, what are the potential disadvantages? Right. We can zoom out and think about those more broadly. So across these different sites that you've looked at and the kind of decades that you cover, what do you see as being some of the biggest benefits and disadvantages of having all of this nuclear power in the South?
- [40:51]
C
Yeah, so I, I think, you know, the, the biggest threat benefits and I, as I was writing this I wanted to, you know, I just to kind of reveal, you know, the background conversations that sometimes happen in the process of writing a book. I did have someone, you know, kind of comment that like, I'm not entirely sure is this like an anti nuclear book? Is this a pro nuclear book? And I, of course I'm like, I really wouldn't cast it as either of those things. And so I do think you have to kind of like take a step back right. And, and think about like okay, well what are the benefits? And then what are the, like what are the downsides? And try to be a somewhat, you know, objective observer based on all of the available evidence, just to state the obvious. And I, you know, I think the biggest benefits for, for communities, particularly some of these rural places, is that, yeah, I mean if you, if you're a relatively tax poor community, just like from the local scale, this can be quite, quite beneficial. And depending on how that tax revenue ends up getting allocated and distributed, as in the case of Green Gulf in Mississippi, this becomes a huge, huge controversy which I, which I didn't mention but I cover in the book to some extent. And so there's perhaps one benefit. Of course it's also accompanied with some risk. And I think those risks seemed much greater in people's minds in the 70s. But, but of course we have seen accidents at nuclear power plants. And so you can't dismiss those risks. You know, they're, they're always going to be present, right. And, and they're real and, and there's, and they can be quite significant. And, and so I think for the south more broadly though, this is, it is transformative for institutions of higher education, for Southern schools, the influx of dollars from, to the Atomic Energy Commission, it does. Well, I wouldn't want to Solely credit that I do think it is instrumental in transforming Southern schools and creating these programs related to science and engineering and also just bringing in people from the outside. I mean, even a place like Oak Ridge, suddenly you have all of these brilliant minds in a variety of different fields who are coming to the American south, right, and, and, and working there. And so I think that is, that can't be discounted that you do suddenly have, right, these little kind of like epicenters of science and engineering. And you also, it helps create and support some of the most like long running programs related to ecology. So the work that's done, for instance, both at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, but also at Oak Ridge, this is, this is pretty interesting stuff that you have these long running programs that have both been instrumental in a variety of different fields, like radio ecology, but also just ecology more generally. And so these are certainly, I think, benefits. Of course they are accompanied with some pretty obvious downsides. One of the reasons why these places become centers of research is because they're so greatly impacted by, by the activities that happen at these places. And so it's a complicated story in that regard that it both brings about maybe some positive benefits, but they can't be considered totally positive because they're always accompanied with a lot of really complex issues. There's a reason why all the researchers are there and in informing our understanding of radioactive environments and so forth and the impacts upon ecosystems. And so I think that's probably a pretty important element to this too. And then today, obviously, you know, it's fascinating that the south is really the only place where we've had new commercial nuclear power reactors come online, at least in this century. And so I do kind of make the case at the end that if we want to know what's going to happen to the nuclear industry, we really have to look at what's happening in the South. And that can give us a kind of great indication of where the industry is going. How viable will commercial nuclear power be in the future? And so I think it tells us something about that too. But just to the question about the, you know, the benefits and the downsides. But also, you know, these are, anytime you have any sort of nuclear site, there are just really complicated long term issues from both decommissioning to the disposal and the maintenance of waste sites. So it's always going to have these other elements to it which are very challenging.
- [46:23]
B
Well, that's why history is so interesting and as you said, important, right? So that we can understand the present, the future by understanding the past and its complexities. So I think that's probably a good place to wrap up our discussion on the book, leaving me to just ask whether there's anything you're currently working on you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [46:41]
C
So I'm currently working on a topic that is, it's not entirely related. I've taken a. But it's somewhat in the same kind of, at least in terms of perhaps environmental history. So now I'm working on a project related to the history of tornadoes and mostly looking at the South. And so I published an article in the latest issue of Agricultural History looking at a tornado in 1840 in Natchez, Mississippi. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm like, I've moved a little bit back in terms of my, my timeline, but I will almost inevitably push some of that research into the 20th century and, and perhaps even a bit further. So that's, that's where I've gone in terms of my next project. And so I'm really looking forward to building on the research that I've already done there and seeing where that takes me.
- [47:46]
B
Yeah, no, it definitely sounds interesting to investigate. So best of luck figuring all that out. And of course, while you are pursuing your next project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Radioactive Dixie A Nuclear History of the American south, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025. Caroline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [48:06]
C
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.