What is Worst About the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, MA, 35 miles from Boston?
Is it that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rated it as one of the 5 least safe in the country, because it keeps having emergency shutdowns, and doesn’t fix what the NRC tells it to fix?
Or that a Pentagon-commissioned study rated it as one of the 8 most vulnerable to catastrophic terror attack because its cooling water intake is unprotected?
Or maybe because the planned high-level nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain isn’t happening, and the waste is piling up on the top floor of the reactor building in a spent fuel pool, under an unreinforced roof, open to aerial attack?
Or could it be the Attorney General’s Office report that the radioactive plume of a fire resulting from loss of cooling in that spent fuel pool could go hundreds of miles, and would cause an estimated 24,000 latent cancers and $488 billion in damages, for which the company has only the tiniest sliver of liability, and which homeowners insurance does not cover?
For me personally, it’s that in dire circumstances, the emergency evacuation plans for Plymouth call for the immediate closing of both the Sagamore and the Bourne bridges!!! Note to Cape: “Swim East.”
Join a March for Our Children to bring these points home. We start in Plymouth on June 13 and end in Boston on June 16 with a 12:30PM rally in Dewey Square, a 1PM walk to the State House, for a 2-4PM rally in Gardner Auditorium. Join us anywhere along the way! For info, go to madownwinders.org.
Guntram Mueller is a Newton resident and a co-founder of Boston Downwinders. He can be reached at guntrammueller1@gmail.com.
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