Gone Fission
Anti-nuke activist Nancy Burton wins an unlikely victory against the Millstone nuclear power plant
Thursday, June 04, 2009
By Andy Bromage
Nancy Burton: “The next step is to shut Milstone.”
Judges threw her lawsuits out of court by the dozen. The attorney general said she shouldn’t be suing at all. State regulators called her claims “baseless.” Critics called her a Quixotic crank.
Against that backdrop, longtime anti-nuke activist Nancy Burton has won the unlikeliest of victories in her decade-long quest to shut down the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford.
The state Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, ruled two weeks ago that Burton has legal standing to sue the state for failure to enforce pollution standards set out in the Connecticut Environmental Protection Act.
Millstone sucks water from Long Island Sound to cool its reactors, pulverizing billions of fish and fish eggs in the process. It then pumps the heated water back into the Sound, posing what Burton says is a radioactive hazard to human health.
via Fairfield County Weekly: News – Gone Fission.
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Of course you are correct in that more than a few fish are affected. I apologize for my hyperbole, but wanted to make a point that this type of decision, if carried to its logical conclusion, will have far-reaching effects on the energy economy of the United States. And seeing lunatic statements like Burtons’s go unchallenged in the media infuriates me.
Furthermore, I suspect that the same people who are demanding three-hundred foot concrete cooing towers be built (at Indian Point) would be the same ones protesting their construction, if it wasn’t “their idea”. Let’s be honest and admit that their real goal is not cooling towers over recirculated river water, or even the fate of the micro-fishies (98% of whom would be consumed and digested by nature and wind up as poop or pulp anyway). No, the real end-game to all this legal maneuvering is the permanent closure of these power plants. For although they would never admit it, for some reason, against all logic and evidence, the activists atavistically believe that energy derived from the atomic nucleus is unnatural, and therefore against their Green religion.
I am all for economically-justifiable mitigating structures or procedures to reduce the environmental impact of our society’s energy production. In that, I am aligned with the recent Supreme Court decision on this topic. But let’s be careful not to kill the golden energy goose in our backyard just because it is an easy target for some superstitious zealots.
The process of cooling doesn’t kill “a fish”, it kills millions and that’s where the problem lies. Global fisheries are in danger and for more than 1 billion people fish is the most important food resource – and it’s getting scare. Ask any commercial fisherman in LIS or in neighboring waters and you’ll understand the enormity of the problem.
I don’t know who Nancy Burton is or if she has “standing” to file her actions, but I do know that if the death of a fish due to the action of a power plant’s circulating water pumps is grounds to shut down the plant, then we had better get used to cold dinner by candlelight because there are few steam generating plants in this country that don’t rely on cooling water from lakes, rivers, or oceans to condense their steam for recycle. And is it too much to ask that a reporter on a given topic actually have some faint understanding of said topic, at least in the interest of furthering an intelligent public discourse, if not in the name of reportorial honesty and integrity? What kind of half-assed reportage provides unchallenged a demonstrably false and loony statement like “posing what Burton says is a radioactive hazard to human health”? Does the “Burton says” part get you out of any obligation to truth, factuality, or balance? By the way, the “reactor” is not cooled by water from the Sound, it is used to condense the secondary plant steam, that rolls the turbines, that makes your electricity. All thermal power plants work this way, not just nukes. If Millstone is guilty of killing a fish by this method, we must shut down all the coal and gas plants that might kill a fish too. Those big cruise ship propellers probably shred a few fillets as well. And put rubber props on your outboard motors. Not to mention those big windmills that the new administration is so enamored with that each kill dozens of birds and bats a month. I say pull ‘em all down, and welcome to the new Stone Age!