Portside

Since the passage of the closed door California climate deal in late July, SCOPE has joined forces with grassroots leaders from across the state to organize town-halls, ground-truth the impacts of polluting industries in our neighborhoods, meet with legislators in Sacramento, and continue to push forward a community-led vision for transformation that starts in our own neighborhoods.

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The way that a person’s race – and to a lesser extent, wealth – determines who gets the benefits or the downsides of drilling and other industrial activity has a term. Depending on who you ask, it’s environmental justice or the more controversial term environmental racism.

The wastes sent to West Lake have most of the uranium removed from them, but they include concentrated radioactive decay products, some of which are tens of thousands of times more radioactive than the parent uranium. Because they are so highly radioactive, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health found that the West Lake landfill holds the “worst” of the Mallinckrodt wastes.