Seabook Revisited
30 years after the pivotal anti-nuke protest, the debate goes on
by Karl Meyer, published in Hampshire Life, 6/8/07 (Daily Hampshire Gazette,
On the morning of Saturday, April 30, 1977, 2,000 protesters from across
A protest the previous August had resulted in 200 arrests.
Calling themselves the Clamshell Alliance, the protesters on this day were students, self-described hippies, environmentalists. They were also carpenters, teachers, veterans and grandparents. Hundreds were from Massachusetts’ Hampshire and Franklin counties. All questioned the wisdom of generating electricity from nuclear fission, and all were stopped by guards at the construction site’s perimeter. “The site looked like a lunar landscape — hundreds of acres of trees had been cut,” says Rick Dodge, who today is an antiques dealer in Montague.
Hours of negotiations ensued among New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson, state police, representatives of the Public Service Company of New Hampshire, which proposed to build the reactors, and spokespeople for Clamshell. But by mid-afternoon, protesters walked onto the site where they raised tents under the spring sun. Having taken a pledge to adhere to non-violent tactics, they held meetings, took votes and speculated as to what would come next.
Out of view, platoons of state troopers from every New England state but Massachusetts were assembling. Bay State Governor Michael Dukakis declined to send any, stating there was no emergency. As dusk fell, momentarily victorious Clams paced the marsh before turning in for the night.
On Sunday morning the helicopters returned. Negotiations began anew. National Guard trucks started arriving. By mid-afternoon Clamshell representatives politely declined the state’s request to leave, announcing their intention to occupy the site. A final arrest warning was issued by police as 18 year-old Robbie Leppzer, a Hampshire College student, filmed the process. “I knew it was a turning-point event,” says Leppzer, now an independent filmmaker who lives in Wendell, “The idea of using civil disobedience in a large-scale way hadn’t been tried before.”
What the demonstrators were able to accomplish over the next few weeks sparked protests all across the country. Ensuing legal challenges delayed projects. The safety and back-up systems required following accidents at Three Mile Island and later Chernobyl drove up construction costs. Efforts to develop evacuation plans proved unwieldy. Scores of projects were scrubbed.
“We stopped nuclear power in its tracks for 30 years,” says Sharon Tracy of New Salem, who today heads Quabbin Mediation, an Orange-based nonprofit that teaches conflict resolution skills. “If you looked at the maps in 1976-1977, there were 30 or 40 planned nuclear plants at the time of Seabrook,” says Rick Dodge. “They never got built.”
But that may be about to change. With concerns about the damage fossil fuels are wreaking on the environment, the idea of nuclear power is becoming more palatable to many. The nuclear industry is ramping up efforts to resurrect itself, and new streamlined regulations have some predicting that the first new plant built in the United States in 20 years could be online in 2015.
This and a 30-year anniversary have the Clamshell Alliance looking to recapture the energy that made them victorious. Though well into middle age with kids, mortgages and grandkids, former members have launched a new effort that they hope will energize people about nuclear issues again. That, along with the attention of a University of Massachusetts archivist who plans to further bring their history to the public eye, are the first steps. “The university,” says Rob Cox, head of special collections at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library there, “is keenly interested in documenting social change. The Clamshell Alliance has a way of thinking about activism that is absolutely fascinating for us.”
On that April day, Pat LaMountain of Greenfield (Pat DeCou at the time) and her future spouse, Tex, stayed put on the Seabrook site with the others. “Helicopters were flying overhead,” she recalls. “Guards watched everything we did.” The thirty-something parents lived on a North Leverett commune and comprised the popular, still-performing folk duo Pat and Tex. Pat, who works as a bookkeeper for the Connecticut River Watershed Council now, remembers a long wait. “We should have been afraid,” she says, “but we weren’t.”
Longtime activist Frances Crowe of Northampton, now 88, was there, too. She recalls a few tough moments as individuals chose to go limp during arrest — contending the arrests were unjust, and that the building of a nuclear plant was the crime, “Some of those people were dragged over stones,” she says.
The arrests took hours. Ultimately, 1,414 people were taken in. Many Hampshire and Franklin county residents were deposited at an armory in Manchester, N.H., which housed half of the protesters. Others were taken to armories elsewhere in the state. Gov. Thomson was faced with feeding and housing a huge group of unwashed prisoners who were keenly aware they had civil rights.
Coached by their legal team, the prisoners decided their greatest strength would be in remaining where they were. Cries of “bail solidarity!” went up. They would stay together — refusing bail until the state’s requests were dropped. When names were called for arraignment, no one stood up. Overnight, Clamshell’s “No Nukes” protest was headline news from New York to Los Angeles. The BBC covered it in Europe.
Rick Dodge, who was a 20-year-old landscape architecture student at UMass at the time, remembers Clamshell as a “force” coming together on the armory floors. “The officials didn’t know what to do with us.” Tex LaMountain smiles at the memory. “It was like they captured us all together and gave us an opportunity to continue our work.”
“There was so much hope alive there,” Frances Crowe recalls. Prisoners set up meeting schedules, held nuclear teach-ins, concerts and talent shows. But all was not easy. One pay phone and a dozen showerheads served 700 people. The wait for a toilet could run an hour. Just inches separated cots. Lights were on all night. Greasy-haired Clams in sweaty sleeping bags grew grumpy.
Spirits rose and fell. People did bail out, due to job or family responsibilities — or claustrophobia. But the Clam’s core “no-bail” strategy held the center. Five days after the arrests, 600 people were still in Manchester. There was pressure on the state to release the prisoners and recoup confinement costs. In an unprecedented move, New Hampshire’s attorney general, David Souter — now a Supreme Court Justice — arrived at district court to appeal to Judge Alfred Cassassa for stiffer penalties. Then Gov. Thomson made an extraordinary national appeal — asking corporations and sympathetic citizens for funds to pay for the arrests. Legal skirmishes resulted in the defeat of the government’s attempt to try the protesters as a group.
On the other side, protesters lost their bid to put nuclear power on trial. The judges refused to let them air their concerns about public health, the cooling tunnels’ effect on marine life and connections to the arms race. As a result, Frances Crowe and others slapped duct tape over their mouths. But as agreed, no bail was requested. Once prisoners gave their names the court entered a plea of not guilty for each, setting them free on their own recognizance. It was Friday, May 13 — one day shy of two weeks since they’d walked onto Seabrook marsh.
Most of the Seabrook protesters ended up paying $100 fines, choosing community service work or two weeks of confinement at a county jail farm in Epping, N.H. and then continued their activism. The next June, 20,000 people took part in a nonviolent demonstration at Seabrook. Similar rallies occurred on nuclear sites at Diablo Canyon in California, and Shoreham, on New York’s Long Island. Awareness of nuclear issues had skyrocketed.
The film “The China Syndrome” premiered in March 1979, portraying a fictionalized near meltdown of a nuclear reactor. Twelve days later the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., did just that. For three days the world monitored developments in the partial-core meltdown. In April 1986, a meltdown at the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine killed 56 people outright. A radioactive cloud spread over Western Europe; 130,000 Ukrainians were permanently evacuated.
Industry plans for new U.S. reactors were abandoned.
At Seabrook, one reactor was finally built, though it didn’t become operational until 1990 — the result of skyrocketing costs, court battles and the subsequent bankruptcy and reorganization of the Public Service Company of New Hampshire. It cost $6 billion — six times initial estimates.
Today, though, over a dozen companies have expressed interest in licensing for several dozen new reactors.”The economics has changed dramatically,” says Alan Griffith. “Nuclear is cost-competitive.”
New government subsidies and tax credits passed in Congress’ 2005 Energy Policy Act are now part of the mix. They amount to some $13 billion. Any cost overruns due to regulatory delays in deploying the first two new plants built would be subsidized by as much as $500 million for each licensed reactor. Another $250 million in overrun money would also be available to each of the next four plants to receive licenses. There’s also a kilowatt-based tax credit of up to $125 million annually per plant — to make nuclear energy cost-competitive during the first eight years of operation.
Griffith, who works for FPL Energy, an affiliate of the Florida Power and Light Company, says most of the plants being proposed are in the South on existing nuke sites. In the Northeast, he says, the effort has been on applying for “uprates” at existing plants, allowing them to raise power outputs, as well as seeking extensions on their current licenses. “We have the intention of applying for an extension at Seabrook,” Griffith says. But, he adds, there are no plans to build a second reactor there.
Today, FPL Group — a Seabrook-FPL Energy offshoot, has joined eight energy giants in the NuStart Energy Consortium — part of NuStart Energy Development, LLC. Those corporations, plus Westinghouse and GE, are pooling their clout in an attempt to obtain a combined Construction and Operating License under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s never-before-tried licensing process, according to the NuStart Web site. Newer streamlined regulations combine construction and operation permitting into a single process, and also limit the junctures where stakeholders can intervene. The consortium’s goal, according to the Web site, is to “test” the licensing process by obtaining a license for one new nuclear plant to be built somewhere in the United States. That first new license could be issued around 2011, the consortium predicts, and lead to the construction of the first new reactor in the U.S. in decades. That, the site says, could be on-line by 2015. NuStart hopes that would spur a nuclear “renaissance” in the country.
“Electricity has got to come from somewhere,” says Griffith. “Nuclear energy is clean. Cost competitive. Reliable.” Unlike oil and coal, he says, “We don’t emit any greenhouse gas.”
Former Clamshell member Sharon Tracy doesn’t believe consortiums of deregulated energy giants can swing the economics of new nuclear power. “I don’t think Wall Street is interested,” she says. A June 2006 article in Business Week entitled “Nuclear Power’s Missing Fuel: Why Wall Street Is Skeptical About Backing a New Round of Nuke Plants” lends her some credence. The article by Adam Aston notes investor skepticism due in part to the nuclear industry’s huge cost overruns of the past. Aston quotes Bob Simon, Democratic staff director of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee. “The real obstacle isn’t the Sierra Club but the 28-year-old analysts on Wall Street.”
Still, the moves the industry is making are rekindling the Clamshell activists’ fire. Tracy is working with other anti-nuke veterans on “To the Village Square: Nukes, Clams & Democracy,” a Web-site based outreach project whose name is taken from an Albert Einstein quote after U.S. bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America’s voice.” The site, www.clamshell-tvs.org, includes Clamshell history, narratives and alternative information on the nuclear industry. “Who better to tell that story than the people who lived it?” asks Tracy.
One of the people Tracy is working with is Kristie Conrad. Conrad, who lives in Hampton, N. H., two miles from Seabrook, says security is one of the issues that motivates her. She says she tries to keep abreast of any news about the reactor and points out that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a “Notice of Violation” to Seabrook Station which appeared in the NRC News on July 27, 2006. The problem, according to Conrad, was a failed security fence. The NRC fined FPL Energy $65,000 though the commission characterized the violation as “low-to-moderate security significance.”
“Some component of the security system” had a problem, Alan Griffith acknowledges, but adds, “Our safety record is unparalleled. We’ve been recognized by the industry as a top-performing plant.” Citing security measures he declines to comment further.
Conrad is not assuaged. “A monetary penalty from the NRC is very unusual,” she says. The danger of storing spent fuel is another issue that concerns her and the others, who point out its potential as a terrorists’ target. They worry about a government and industry plan to transport radioactive material to the Yucca Mountain federal nuclear waste repository in Nevada, slated for completion in 2017.
David Lochbaum of Washington, D.C., a nuclear expert who has operated reactors in nine states and is the author of “Nuclear Waste Disposal Crisis,” says those fears are legitimate. Spent nuclear fuel can be dangerous for 300 to 400 years, according to Lochbaum. After being fissioned to generate electricity the fuel assemblies are unstable, he says. “The radioactivity can kill cells,” he said in a telephone interview. “Depending on the dose it can mutate cells.” The biggest concern is containment, says Lochbaum, the danger of radioactivity contaminating the groundwater and entering the food chain.
Lochbaum, who has worked for the past decade as director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., and has testified before Congress, adds that early on, the heat is the worry. The radioactivity produces intense heat that must be cooled. “That’s the dangerous part,” he says. “If you don’t remove that heat you can start a fire. It takes about half a century for that risk to lessen.”
Once the fire risk passes, the radioactive hazard slowly drops down to where after 400 years, it’s essentially what it was when the uranium was taken out of the ground, says Lochbaum. He characterizes hazards in the nuclear fuel cycle for the layperson this way: “On the front end when the material is in the reactor there is risk of meltdown, etc. At the other end, you have Yucca Mountain where they’re now looking to secure the stuff for thousands of years. With all that time in between — the stuff can’t be benign.”
Lochbaum is not convinced that a nuclear renaissance is looming. “Brown’s Ferry Unit 1 was restarted today at a cost of $1.8 billion for the Tennessee Valley Authority,” he says. That reactor — one of three on the site in Athens, Ala., started operating in 1973, but was shut down after a fire in 1975. After extensive rehabilitation it was restarted the following year, but was shut down again 1985. It hadn’t operated since. “The cost of new reactors is so high that the TVA would rather bring this plant from the ’70s back than build a new one,” he says, noting the TVA is now considering spending $2 billion to rehabilitate its Watts Bar Unit 2 plant — which was over half complete in Springdale, Tenn., when its construction was halted in 1985.
William McGee, who lives in Northfield, not far from the nuclear plant on the Connecticut River at Vernon, Vt., is one who thinks nuclear energy is on the verge of a comeback. He was public affairs director at the now-dismantled Yankee Rowe nuclear plant in Franklin County for the Yankee Atomic Electric Company from 1981 to 1997 and became familiar with some of the Clamshell demonstrators when they began sitting-in at the Rowe and Vernon plants in the years after Seabrook. “The company created my position because of the antinuclear movement,” he says, but he adds that before taking the job he did his own research on nuclear power. “I convinced myself that it wasn’t dangerous.” And, he says, he has no doubts about it today. “I know the people who work in these plants. I live three miles from Vermont Yankee. I have no problem with that.”
He acknowledges concerns over the storage of the spent fuel, but says the issue doesn’t trouble him. “OK, for a couple of hundred years this stuff is really dangerous. So we package it. It’s a manageable problem.” As for worries about terrorists, McGee contends there are “softer” targets, including sports stadiums and water supplies.
Nuclear power accounts for approximately 25 percent of New England’s energy, with the lion’s share coming from carbon-based coal, oil and cleaner-burning natural gas. “I think the environmental argument is the one that’s going to drive the train more than anything else,” McGee says.
Clamshell veterans understand the dilemma, but maintain nuclear is the worst option. Conservation has never been fully tried, they say. They want localized sources and sustainable technologies on the energy-fix forefront — solar, wind, improved hydro.
Frances Crowe, whose papers are already housed in the Smith College Library, became an activist after the Hiroshima bombing, and worked against the draft during the Vietnam War. Since Seabrook she’s been involved with issues including the nuclear freeze, apartheid, women’s rights, the Iraq war, and bringing the radio program Democracy Now to local airwaves. She blames a “failure of the times” for the nation’s turning away from research into sustainable energy; she points to the demise of the UMass Toward Tomorrow Energy Fair, funded during the Carter presidency, as one example. “They dropped the sustainable contracts and went for the government stuff — the auto and nuclear industry at the top level were manipulating things,” she says.
“I really believed they weren’t going to get to build that power plant,” she says of the Seabrook reactor now standing.
Tex LaMountain, who with his wife composed “The Seabrook Song” over 30 years ago, says an effort like the Manhattan Project, which escalated the development of the atomic bomb, is needed to find a clean, safe energy source. “I’d like to see us have an open discussion,” LaMountain says, “not among politicians, but among people who are being honest about the consequences of this energy policy, and that energy policy.” Sharon Tracy agrees. After victories and defeats she set aside her antinuclear activities in the 1990s. “People burned out,” she concedes. “We stopped nuclear power, but failed to put anything in its place.” But she’s back in now — an older, wiser woman, with renewed Clamshell energy. “We still have a job to do, and it can be done.”
Karl Meyer is a freelance writer from Colrain. He can be reached at karlm@crocker.com.