KENTUCKY’S
KING
while restaurants, homebuilders,
and other establishments are all
dependent on the business that
the plant’s employees provide.
In 1990, McConnell offered an
incumbent’s solution by playing up his ties to then-President
George H.W. Bush and floating
the idea of a new state-of-theart plant in Paducah. According
to news accounts at the time,
Sloane was far less enthusiastic
about nuclear power, citing concerns about safety and hazardous
waste. “That killed Sloane in that
campaign,” the plant union’s vice
president, Jim Key, told HuffPost.
Paducah never got that new
plant, but McConnell discovered
a winning strategy and continued
to patch together new contracts
and make-work jobs, exploiting
residents’ fears over layoffs. The
senator kept the plant’s doors open,
but he did so at the expense of the
workers’ own well-being. For decades, the plant’s toxins had spread
through the air and into the ground,
slowly killing its own workers and
tainting the surrounding area — a
fact McConnell ignored in Washington and in Paducah.
Workers had breathed in plutonium-dipped dust, sloshed through
areas high in harsh chemicals, and
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
TODAY, McCONNELL FINDS
HIMSELF AT BOTH THE MOST
POWERFUL AND MOST
VULNERABLE MOMENT OF
HIS CAREER.
got hazardous powders on their
food and in their teeth. They’d taken the poisons home with them on
their clothes. On site, workers had
erected “Drum Mountain,” a scrap
heap that bled contaminants into
the soil. Lawyers and scientists
would later deploy “groundwater
plume maps” to show how far the
toxins had spread.
But the effects of the toxins were
plain to see. As early as the 1970s,
Fred Buckley’s patriotic fervor
had begun to dim. He no longer
completely trusted management.
Although he moved up the plant’s
ranks, from security guard to running control rooms, he suspected
the work was far more dangerous
than his bosses had let on. When
he welcomed his son Michael at
the plant in August 1973, he did
so with a warning: Better make
sure the equipment isn’t contaminated. Don’t trust the company.
Trust yourself. “I tried to stress —
be sure to not take anybody else’s
word for it,” he recalls.