Editor’s note: This commentary is by Amelia Shea, who serves on the board of the New England Coalition and has worked at Green Living Journal since 1991.
[M]ost of the serious environmental problems we now face can be traced directly back to a lack of understanding or respect for the natural world. We are at a threshold when many people recognize the importance of reversing this trend and taking advantage of the opportunity to move things forward in a more healthy direction — with more environmental respect and consciousness.
Throughout time and in many cultures, people who have lived close to the earth have regarded water as a source of life and sacred. During the Standing Rock protests when people were trying to protect the drinking water for 17 million people downstream, many of the protesters’ signs read, “water is life.”
In 2014, when Vermont Yankee was shuttered, it was discovered that groundwater had been leaking into the turbine building. In early 2016 an Nuclear Regulatory Commission report revealed that the amount of water leaking into the building had become so substantial that Entergy had dealt with the situation by storing the radioactive water in portable swimming pools on the building’s lower level.
The radioactive water is now being shipped to a nuclear waste storage site in Tennessee. So far Entergy has shipped 608,000 gallons of the contaminated water. Plant officials have been trying to stop the leaks and have managed to stanch the flow of water leaking into the building to 500 to 600 gallons a day. This is a decrease from 2,500 to 3,000 gallons a day that company officials claim occurred at the height of the crisis.
The leaks have not stopped.
Since Vermont Yankee first began operation in 1972 the Connecticut River has been used as a disposal site for the plant’s heat and waste.
When there have been problems at the plant over the years it has often taken a significant amount of time to make the information public and to hold the company accountable. With a track record like this it is wise to examine closely any agreements about the sale, decommissioning and the future of the Vermont Yankee site. Despite what might on the surface appear as beneficial financially, it is best to weigh carefully the consequences of selling the plant to a company like NorthStar that has no experience in decommissioning full-scale commercial nuclear power plants like Vermont Yankee.
What is on the table here, with both the proposed sale to NorthStar and the management of the radioactive waste on the site, is the question of how best to protect the residents, the land and the water long into the future from the harbingers of birth defects, cancer and genetic illness. New England Coalition is advocating for intensified environmental stewardship of the site and to let the land lie fallow after the cleanup in order to achieve that goal.
