Pilgrim has withstood a virtual tsunami of bad news the last couple of years.
It seems like just about everybody wants it to go away. All Cape and Vineyard towns, the governor, and our state and US representatives– all want to see it closed, for reasons that have been rehearsed almost daily in this paper.
At 43 years, the plant is well past its design age. It stores (in sketchy fashion) over 4 times the spent fuel rods it was designed for. If were to blow, there is, despite four decades plus to come up with one, no evacuation plan for Cape Codders.
Indeed, according to the evacuation plan that does exist for others, the bridges would be closed to prevent fleeing Cape Codders from interfering with fleeing victims of the Plymouth area.
In March, coverage in this paper of the trial of the Pilgrim 12 trespassers consisted almost entirely of day after day of expert testimony as to the urgent need to close down the plant.
Fukushima is not Pilgrim, but Cape Codders can be excused for following with interest (as in reading our potential fate in) the deluge of scary stories about the unfolding Japanese tragedy: rising cancer rates, the suffering of workers trying to contain the disaster, the threat to fish of the plume of contamination to fish off the US West coast thousands of miles away.
As for the argument that Fukushima has no relevance for us in seismically stable New England, a recent letter to this paper cites the writer’s insurance company’s recommendation of adding earthquake insurance to her coverage, since “recent earthquake activity in New England gives us considerable cause for concern.” Another source comes up with the counter-intuitive news that there’s “an 80 percent chance we’ll have an 8 point or higher quake by 2025.” (Harvey Wasserman, ECOWATCH )
Most of the emphasis in the push to close Pilgrim has been on the worst-case scenario. Meanwhile, we are learning that radiation-as-usual has its own ongoing impacts on health. On March 20 this paper reported the court testimony of Richard Clapp, director of the Massachusetts Cancer Registry that “in the first two years (of his tenure), we found… a fourfold excess of leukemia in people who lived and worked near the plant.” A large German study and one of California’s Diablo Canyon plant corroborate these findings.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to be a reassuring presence in our lives but in May, after the NRC announced it did not see fit to force plants to move spent fuel rods into safer dry storage, the office of our U.S. Senator issued this statement: “Markey blasts NRC Vote on Dangerous Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage.”
Even less confidence-inspiring, the former chair of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, recently declared that all U.S. Nuclear plants should be phased out because we “Can’t guarantee against accident causing widespread land contamination.” (“Nuclear Intelligence Weekly,” 29 March.)
There has been the feeling that with all this bad news surely Pilgrim’s closure is imminent. But a for-profit company (with an industry lapdog regulatory board on its side) is hard to dislodge.
Some activists have soberly suggested that until the plant loses money, as has happened with a number of other U.S. plants (including Entergy’s Vermont Yankee), it will hold out against all the opposition in the world.
Recently a hopeful possibility has emerged. Encouraged by Cape activists, the governor in March wrote to the NRC requesting closure of the plant. In response NRC chair Allison Macfarlane responded that in fact it is up to the state to guarantee effective evacuation. Since, given the geography, there is no possibility of effective evacuation, doesn’t that give the governor the right—and the duty–to close Pilgrim down?
Being the Pilgrim slayer would be a wonderful way for Patrick to go out. Meanwhile, a lot of people are working hard to make sure that in any case the new governor is determined to get the job done at long last.
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