Tournament: Voices | Round: 2 | Opponent: Marlborough SD | Judge: Harris, Michael
Aff

Standard is minimizing structural violence

Carder, Eddy. “The American Environmental Justice Movement.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 9, 2016. http://www.iep.utm.edu/enviro-j/. 
Environmental justice advocates contend that instances of environmental injustice are not simply arbitrary realities which occur in varying contexts.  Rather, instances of environmental injustice are the outcome of an institutional oppression and isolation which have set up an inevitable framework of the powerful oppressing the powerless. The victims, through a significant occurrence of historical and social realities, have been cut off from the power required even to challenge the causes of environmental injustice. In a very real sense, the environmental justice movement represents another dimension of social liberation, which attempts to protect victims from institutional and systemic oppression. However, the task of the environmental justice movement should not be understood only in terms of the negative.   
 

Winter and Leighton ‘99: Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” AB
Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 
 

Material solutions outweigh abstract solutions because ideal theories fail to account for personal identity and marginalized groups.

Dr. Tommy J. Curry. The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century. 2014

Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.”At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. This gap between what is actual(in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. 

C1: Nuclear Power oppresses indigenous communities

Karlsson 09
Bengt Karlsson “Nuclear Lives: Uranium Mining, Indigenous Peoples, and Development in India” 2009 Economic and Political Weekly
Still, the public distrust of the nuclear industry appears to be significantly higher than with other industrial sectors. Most people prefer not to have any nuclear installations in their \"back yard\", regardless of official assurances that these are perfectly safe.22 The type of distrust expressed by people in Meghalaya regarding the alleged safety of uranium mining can be observed more or less universally, and this also holds for related activities in the nuclear chain. The other main site in India where ucil hopes to start mining uranium is in Andhra Pradesh, and these plans have also unleashed massive protests in that state. Similarly in the us, Canada and Australia, uranium mining evokes fierce protests, not least among the indigenous peoples on whose lands most of the deposits are located.23 The Navajo nation has called for a total ban on mining on its lands. In 2006, the Navajo hosted the Indigenous World Uranium Summit with indigenous delegates participating from various parts of the world. In the declaration of the summit, the main demand was a global ban on uranium mining and related activities on native lands. The summit also recalled the declaration issued in Salzburg at the World Uranium Hearing in 1992, that uranium and other nuclear materials must remain in their natural location. \"Leave it in the ground\", that is.24 The Green Party in Canada, for example, has lined up with indigenous and environ mental organisations demanding a uranium mining ban on the basis that it is \"extremely hazardous to the environment and health of mine workers and public\".25 The anti-nuclear movement is increasingly building up transnational alliances, turning the \"not-in-my-backyard\" politics into a \"not-in-anyone\'s-backyard\" principle, as Harvey (1996:391) put it in a discussion on grass roots environmental justice movements.

Nuclear Power aggravates social inequalities
Chen, Michelle. "The Radioactive Racism Behind Nuclear Energy." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 25 Mar. 2011. Web. 11 Aug. 2016http:www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-chen/nuclear-energy-indigenous-_b_840528.htmlWhen the apocalyptic cloud erupted over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world woke up to the dawn of the nuclear age. Today, if we survey the landscape of nuclear development across the planet, we see that the destructive impacts of the technology are often paired with the dehumanizing impacts of environmental racism. At every point in the nuclear production chain, the industry has sloughed a disproportionate share of the risk on marginalized communities, from native peoples in the Southwest United States to the Australian outback. While the rest of the world hums along with nuclear power, many of these communities have fought a losing battle against the standard corporate line that technological advancements have led to seamless safety. Last week in South Africa, environmental activists recharged their anti-nuclear campaign in light of the metastasizing disaster in Japan. Today, in the shadow of Fukushima, the African continent’s one nuclear power plant, near Cape Town, is no longer a symbol of South Africa’s relative industrial advancement. Rather, it is an emblem of a ruthless pursuit of new fuel at the public’s expense. Under the government’s energy program, designed to wean the country of its current dependency on coal, nuclear power will grow to about 23 percent of new energy generated by 2031, from just 2 percent in 2009, according to Bloomberg. Advocates for the poor, women and other disenfranchised communities say the environmental harms of nuclear power will aggravate the social inequalities that persist despite the end of apartheid. In an email from Cape Town, Muna Lakhani, co-coordinator of Earthlife Africa’s Unplug Nuclear Campaign, told Colorlines that the government’s new nuclear agenda “was received with shock by civil society and labour formations” and amounted to “effectively an ‘up yours’ response to the citizens of our country”: 

The Radiation exposure has had terminal and debilitating effects on indigenous people
Warden  "Environmental Justice Case Study: The Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository and the Western Shoshone." Warden, University of Michigan. N.p., 2000. Web. 11 Aug. 2016.
 Over the last forty years, many Native American communities have been constantly exposed to low-level doses of radiation from a variety of different sources. Since more than half of all United States uranium deposits lie under indigenous lands, uranium mining, milling, conversion, and enrichment have become common activities, especially on Western Shoshone Land.
In addition to the potential threat of power plant wastes, these communities are also being exposed to radiation from the Nevada Test Site (NTS), also located on traditional Shoshone land. The NTS has been used by the U.S. and Britain to test nuclear weapons for many years. The Western Shoshone National Council considers these tests to be more like bombs, because of the destruction that results from these experiments. Since 1951, approximately 1,350 square miles of their 43,000 square mile territory have been destroyed by hundreds of craters and tunnels that are no more than unsupervised nuclear waste dumps.
There have been environmental monitoring reports issued throughout the years concerning the status of NTS, dated all the way from the 1950's to 1991. These reports prove the presence of substantial low-level radioactive releases of iodine, strontium, cesium, plutonium, and noble gases in outlying areas, with higher concentrations found in reservation communities in close proximity to NTS. Residents have reported unusual animal deaths, human hair loss, the soil in the area turning a dark black color, along with increases of cancer and birth defects.

(have to adopt the power system that solves for terrorism and indigenous land dumping)

Uranium mining disproportionately harms indigenous populations.
Curtis Kline, "URANIUM MINING AND NATIVE RESISTANCE: THE URANIUM EXPLORATION AND MINING ACCOUNTABILITY ACT", IC Magazine: A Publication of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, 07/02/2013, https://intercontinentalcry.org/uranium-mining-and-native-resistance-the-uranium-exploration-and-mining-accountability-act/

Native Americans in the northern great plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It’s a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory. According to a report by Earthworks, "Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects." Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States. There are also 1,200 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation, where cancer rates are also significantly disproportionate. In fact, it is estimated that 60 to 80 percent of all uranium in the United States is located on tribal land, and three fourths of uranium mining worldwide is on Indigenous land.

C2: Nuclear Terrorism affects minorities first. 

ISIS poses a large nuclear security threat.
Bunn, Matthew G., et al. "Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?." (2016).
IS’s capabilities are substantial. If the group were to pursue nuclear weapons, it has more money, controls more territory and people, and enjoys a greater ability to recruit experts globally than al Qaeda at its strongest ever had. Moreover, unlike many terrorist groups, IS has demonstrated an ability to manage implementation of large-scale, long-term projects.22 IS’s intentions with respect to nuclear terrorism remain more obscure. There is no publicly available evidence of a significant IS nuclear weapons effort. The group’s apocalyptic ideology, however, envisions a final war between its forces and those of the United States and the West (the “Crusaders”), which the group expects ultimately to win. For taking on the world’s leading superpower and its allies, nuclear weapons would surely be extremely useful. The group’s documented indiscriminate mass casualty attacks and horrific individual acts of cruelty and mayhem demonstrate a significant willingness to inflict destruction on a wide scale and disregard for the Islamic prohibition on the slaughter of innocents. In November 2015, Belgian police discovered that some IS operatives involved in the Paris attacks had taken hours of surveillance video at the home of a senior official of SKN-CEN, a Belgian nuclear research center with a substantial amount of HEU on-site. Investigators have not managed to confirm what the terrorists were seeking to accomplish through this monitoring. One possibility—and it is only a possibility—is that they envisioned kidnapping the official or his family in an effort to force him to help them gain access to the nuclear facility and its materials.23 This focused, extended monitoring of a nuclear official at a sensitive site is the most worrying indicator of IS nuclear intent to date.

The risk of nuclear terrorism increases with nuclear production
Early, Bryan R., Matthew Furhmann, and Quan Li. "British Political Thought." The Encyclopedia of Political Science (2013): 1-22. Atoms for Terror? Nuclear Programs and NonCatastrophic Nuclear Radiological Terrorism. British Journal of Political Science, Mar. 2013. Web. 16 Aug. 2016
http://people.tamu.edu/~quanli/papers/BJPS_2013_nrterrorism.pdf
The presence and size of civilian nuclear infrastructure affects terrorist groups’ cost–benefit calculus in several respects. First, as many experts argue, gaining access to the NR materials represents the most important hurdle for terrorists seeking to engage in NR terrorism. Civilian nuclear programs increase the availability of fissile materials (e.g., plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU)) and radioactive materials (e.g., Cesium- 137 and Strontium-90), all of which could be used in NR terror attacks.13 Many observers argue that these materials are widely available in countries with nuclear programs and are sometimes poorly guarded.14 Therefore, rational and cost-sensitive terrorists will be tempted to either steal NR materials or purchase them illicitly when they are cheap and/or readily available. Since terrorists have significantly greater access to nuclear and radiological materials in countries with larger civil nuclear programs, the probability that they will employ NR terrorism in these states increases. Although terrorists could acquire NR materials in one country and use them in another, it is easier to use the materials in the country in which they have been acquired. Transporting NR materials across borders involves additional costs and raises the likelihood of interception.15 Groups are cognizant of this consideration and often look for NR materials in the country they wish to attack. Several notable cases support this expectation. Chechen militants have reportedly attempted to obtain NR materials within Russia more often than from other countries. In January 2000 they acquired radioactive materials from a nuclear waste plant in Grozny and stole radioactive materials from a nuclear power station in the region of Rostov between July 2001 and July 2002.16 Similarly, in July 2002 the Real IRA reportedly attempted to steal plutonium from the Sellafield nuclear power station in the United Kingdom after discovering the difficulties of acquiring fissile material from distant locations.1 Second, the presence and size of a civilian nuclear program in a country provides additional incentives for terrorist groups to employ NR terrorism. As noted earlier, NR terrorist incidents are consequential even if they do not inflict substantial human casualties. Indeed, Brian Jenkins noted this almost forty years ago when he concluded that, ‘A well-publicized terrorist attack on a civilian nuclear facility, even if the terrorists failed in their intended mission, could be almost as alarming to the world as a terrorist success.’18 NR terrorism can be an attractive tactic to some terrorists because it is capable of generating widespread fear, undermining public support for civilian nuclear energy, sapping public confidence in governments’ competence in ensuring security, and forcing governments to commit vast resources to guarding their nuclear infrastructures.19 These costs will be much higher in countries with large nuclear programs than in those without them, increasing terrorist groups’ incentives to target the former states. This logic is borne out by the terrorist campaign orchestrated by Chechen rebels during the 1990s. While the radioactive mine they planted in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park was their most high-profile incident, Chechen rebels planted another dirty bomb outside Grozny in 1998 and they repeatedly threatened to use nuclear and radiological weapons against the Russian government. This campaign aroused significant fear among the public and forced Russia’s cash-strapped government to devote considerable resources to improving the security of its nuclear installations and radiological materials storage facilities.20 Given the difficulty of successfully launching NR attacks, we should find that terrorist groups are more likely to employ this tactic when the benefits are especially high. Hence, we should find NR terrorism being used much more frequently in countries with extensive nuclear programs than in those without them. Third, nuclear facilities present targets of opportunity for terrorist groups.21 Attacking structures that produce or house radioactive materials, such as nuclear power plants, could cause large-scale radiological contamination or, at least, create widespread panic among the public.22 Such attacks may appeal to groups seeking to cause mass casualties or generate publicity. An unidentified Chechen rebel field commander underscored the perception that nuclear power plants are inviting targets of opportunity when he said, ‘Take nuclear power stations – Chernobyl. Blow one up and the damage lasts for 300 years.’23 Chechen rebels issued a number of public threats to bomb nuclear power plants in Russia throughout the 1990s. Numerous other groups have targeted nuclear plants. For example, from 1977 to 1981, Basque terrorists carried out a sustained terrorist campaign against a Spanish nuclear power plant. Over that period, they attacked the facility four times, killing four of its workers and causing damage worth over $21 million.24 In 1982, environmental activists with ties to French and German terrorist groups fired five rocket-propelled grenades at the Superphe´nix fast breeder reactor, which was under construction in France.25 More recent terrorist interest in targeting nuclear facilities is evidenced by the revelations that a suspected Al-Qaeda agent worked in five US nuclear plants from 2002 to 2008. The preceding discussion leads to our first hypothesis on the connection between nuclear programs and NR terrorism: HYPOTHESIS 1: The probability of being targeted by NR terrorism increases as the size of a country’s nuclear program expands.

Caldicott, By Helen, Editor’S Note: The Following Is The Introduction To Dr. Helen Caldicott’S, and New. NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER(n.d.): n. pag. Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. 2006. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
http://tria.fcampalans.cat/images/Nuclear20Power20is20not20the20answer20-20H.20Caldicott.pdf
In this day and age, nuclear power plants are also obvious targets for terrorists, inviting assault by plane, truck bombs, armed attack, or covert intrusion into the reactor’s control room. The subsequent meltdown could induce the death of hundreds of thousands of people in heavily populated areas, and they would expire slowly and painfully, some over days and others over years from acute radiation illness, cancer, leukemia, congenital deformities, or genetic disease. Such an attack at the Indian Point reactors, thirty-five miles from Manhattan, for instance, would effectively incapacitate the world’s main financial center for the rest of time. An attack on one of the thirteen reactors surrounding Chicago would wreak similar catastrophic medical consequences. Amazingly, security at U.S. nuclear power plants remains at virtually the same lax levels as prior to the 9/11 attacks. Adding to the danger, nuclear power plants are essentially atomic bomb factories. A 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 500 pounds of plutonium a year; normally ten pounds of plutonium is fuel for an atomic bomb. A crude atomic bomb sufficient to devastate a city could certainly be crafted from reactor grade plutonium. Therefore any non-nuclear weapons country that acquires a nuclear power plant will be provided with the ability to make atomic bombs (precisely the issue the world confronts with Iran today). As the global nuclear industry pushes its nefarious wares upon developing countries with the patent lie about “preventing global warming,” collateral consequences will include the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a situation that will further destabilize an already unstable world.

(links into structural violence bc these terrorist strikes occur at power plants which are in indigenous communities meaning the attacks affect indigenous communities and minorities first)

C3: Nuclear Power cannot solve

Nuclear power cannot solve for the amount of carbon emissions
Gottfried, Kurt. "Climate Change and Nuclear Power." Social Research 73.3, Politics and Science: How Their Interplay Results in Public Policy (2006): 1011-024. JSTOR. Web. 09 Aug. 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971865?Search=yesandresultItemClick=trueandsearchText=nuclearandsearchText=powerandsearchText=climateandsearchText=changeandsearchUri=2Faction2FdoBasicSearch3FQuery3Dnuclear2Bpower2Bclimate2Bchange26amp3Bacc3Don26amp3Bwc3Don26amp3Bfc3Doff26amp3Bgroup3Dnoneandseq=5#page_scan_tab_contents
The Princeton study introduces the useful concept of a “wedge,” defined as any measure that produces a reduction of 1 billion tons of carbon deposited annually in the atmosphere. The growth in energy demand assumed by the study-a doubling in the coming 50 years-implies that a cut of seven wedges, employed steadily, are needed to achieve stabilization in 50 years.
The study then provides a list of measures-technologies, public policy initiatives-that exist today, and which could be scaled up to become one or more wedges:
Efficiency and conservation: new autos at 60mpg-50 percent less driving per 30 mpg auto; 25 percent reduced heat loss from buildings; higher power plant efficiency-a total of 4 wedges
Decarbonizing of fossil fuel in electricity production: natural gas displacing coal; CO2 capture and storage; electricity from wind; solar power; biofuels (ethanol, etc.)-a total of 7 wedges
Natural sinks: reduced tropical deforestation and better management of forests generally; reforestation; soil management-a total of more than 2 wedges
Tripling nuclear power globally (including the United States)-1 wedge

Production of Nuclear Energy increases CO2 emissions
Helen Caldicott
Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer
06
http://tria.fcampalans.cat/images/Nuclear20Power20is20not20the20answer20-20H.20Caldicott.pdf
Nuclear power is not “clean and green,” as the industry claims, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process. Burning of this fossil fuel emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary “greenhouse gas”—into the atmosphere. In addition, large amounts of the now-banned chlorofluorocarbon gas (CFC) are emitted during the enrichment of uranium. CFC gas is not only 10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient as an atmospheric heat trapper (“greenhouse gas”) than CO2, but it is a classic “pollutant” and a potent destroyer of the ozone layer. While currently the creation of nuclear electricity produces only one-third the amount of CO2 emitted from a similar-sized, conventional gas generator, this is a transitory statistic. Over several decades, as the concentration of available uranium ore declines, more fossil fuels will be required to extract the ore from less concentrated ore veins. Within ten to twenty years, nuclear reactors will produce no net energy because of the massive amounts of fossil fuel that will be necessary to mine and to enrich the remaining poor grades of uranium. (The nuclear power industry contends that large quantities of uranium can be obtained by reprocessing radioactive spent fuel. However, this process is extremely expensive, medically dangerous for nuclear workers, and releases large amounts of radioactive material into the air and water; it is therefore not a pragmatic consideration.) By extension, the operation of nuclear power plants will then produce exactly the same amounts of greenhouse gases and air pollution as standard power plants.