Even though I’ve lived in Tennessee most of my life, I always feel like an outsider when East Tennesseans casually chat about all the nuclear waste they’ve seen, touched and interacted with their entire lives. I don’t believe there is a single family in East Tennessee who hasn’t been up close and personal with cancer. If I ever cease to feel chills down my spine when the conversations inevitably wander to the topic of Oak Ridge’s contamination of the land, the water, the air, basically everything we need to survive, then I have been here too long.