Take Action!

Safer Spent Fuel Storage Campaign

 

Pilgrim Watch, independent scientists and many towns have raised safety and security concerns regarding Pilgrim’s storage of nuclear fuel. Safer storage must be advocated to make the waste less vulnerable to terrorist acts. If the spent fuel pool were successfully attacked an area three times the size of Massachusetts could become permanently contaminated.
 

ACTION: Contact your elected federal, state and local officials asking them to actively support a state and local town resolution calling for safer spent fuel storage.
 

Please Email a copy of signed statements to Lampert@adelphia.net  so that we will have a record.

 

Sample Letter

 

To The Honorable Members of the General Court To the Board of Selectmen, Town of _________ Thank you for your leadership on public safety. A nuclear power plant has several vulnerable targets, but none poses a greater threat to the environment, economy, and public health than the reactor’s stockpile of 'spent' radioactive fuel. The fuel is extremely deadly and will remain so over the course of thousands of years. It must be stored more safely than current practice.   Pilgrim’s used nuclear fuel rods are in a crowded “swimming pool” outside primary containment - 2,278 rods (spring, 2002) in a space designed for 880. The pool is vulnerable to attack; and accidents can happen. If the pool water is lost, the fuel rods will ignite, the fire can not be extinguished, and vast quantities of radioactivity will be released that will contaminate over 25,000 square miles. We may loose our health and our home – but not our mortgage. Dispersed secured dry casks are a safer way to store spent fuel. Casks do not need electrical power, cooling water or human intervention. Yucca Mountain, the proposed federal repository will not solve the waste problem for many years. Legal suits are pending; the Government Accounting Office estimated that it will open 2015, at the earliest; it will take decades to move the nation’s waste and licensees can sell or trade their place on the shipping schedule; Yucca’s maximum capacity will be reached by waste generated by 2013, nationwide, then another site will have to be developed. It is important we take action now. The resolution asks (The Commonwealth/ Town of__) to request federal regulators to require that all but recently unloaded spent nuclear fuel be moved to secured dry casks, and that a low density storage pool be used only for recently unloaded fuel that is too hot to place in casks. For the above reasons, I respectfully request that (The General Court/ Town of___) pass the following resolution and send a copy of the signed resolution to the Governor of the Commonwealth, The Honorable Massachusetts Members of Congress, and Chairman Nils Diaz, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.   Sign your name, and be sure to include your address