While the movement to close down Pilgrim is making headlines, according to a March 11 story in this paper Plymouth selectmen recently signed a deal for $28 million for continuing to host the plant for another three years.
“The lucrative arrangement has some thinking it wouldn’t be easy to get Plymouth to back a plant closure.” Indeed.
Its easy with 20/20 hindsight to blame the citizens of Plymouth for putting us all at risk when 41 years ago they decided to host Pilgrim nuclear power plant. No plan for waste disposal? No evacuation plan for Cape Cod? Seriously? What were they thinking?
(How could Cape Codders have made so little fuss about it at the time? What were we thinking?)
We should of course give Plymouth a break. Before Three mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, before “Swim East,” the whole country was much more naïve about nukes (including a lot of us who would now like to see Pilgrim closed down). It was perhaps not unreasonable to believe that engineers would come up with a solution to the disposal problem. And perhaps with all the propaganda about clean, safe fuel, evacuating just wasn’t foremost in most peoples’ minds.
And then there were those considerable tax breaks.
Now, 41 years later, sadder but wiser, three years after the most recent and burgeoning disaster, many of us, see Pilgrim in a very different light. Now it seems plain wrong for Plymouth to take that money from Entergy. In fact, now it seems not unreasonable to require of them that they do everything they can to remedy what now looks like a terrible mistake: to unpermit what they have permitted. To close down Pilgrim ( The plant has for some time been storing four times the agreed upon number of spent fuel rods. Doesn’t that cancel the permitting contract? )
The citizens of Plymouth owe it to themselves, they owe it to their Cape neighbors, on whose lives the continued operation of the plant casts a shadow.
No Comments