NRC Officials Met with Skepticism Regarding Pilgrim Safety

Representatives from the NRC were met with skepticism from both the audience and the Board of Selectmen Tuesday night.

The NRC presented Entergy's plans for building a dry cask storage facility. The facility would eventually house some of the aproximately 3,000 spent fuel rods now in the pool at the Pilgrim plant. Three of the dry cask storage towers are scheduled to be built and loaded with spent fuel by the summer of 2014.

Selectman Ken Tavares told the NRC he found the idea of storing the fuel rods alarming. "How safe are they? I'm not convinced they are."

Chairman Matt Muratore made an unusual request to the NRC for the 104 communities that host nuclear power plants.

"I've asked the NRC to actually have a public forum down in Washington for the 104 communities that host nuclear power plants and have the President of the United States actually be there to listen to the people of what's really happening in these communities."

Tavares told the federal officials that after the Fukushima accident, "the mood in our community changed dramatically." He said the NRC had done a poor job in communicating with the town, criticizing the format of the NRC open house, in which people spoke with NRC officials one on one or in small groups,  that preceded the meeting.

Some audience members, particularly members of the Cape Downwinders, took issue with the open house, concerned that none of the statements made by NRC representatives were on the record, rather, they were made in private conversation.

However, Selectman John  Mahoney, the board’s representative on the Nuclear Matters Committee, called the meeting a step up from the presentation at Plymouth North High School in 2011, in which the NRC only answered pre-submitted questions.

Other concerns included Pilgrim's vent system, which is identical to that at Fukushima and failed in that instance. The vent system is supposed to relieve pressure on the reactor in case of an emergency. Ben Almeida of Manomet asked how a reactor with vents could be considered safe. NRC regulator Ronald Bellamy and Nuclear Matters Committee member Paul Smith, a former Pilgrim employee, tried to answer his question, but the answers didn’t seem to satisfy Almeida. When Bellamy admitted the plant might release radioactive material into the air during an accident, he responded "how can you relicense such a plant?" Bellamy’s reply was greeted with derisive laughter, "accident analysis is not part of the relicensing process."

After the audience settled down, he added that nuclear power plants have multiple safety systems, one of which, in the case of Pilgrim and similar plants, are vents that could release radioactive material into the air in order to prevent a catastrophic failure.

Some information for this article was gathered from The Manomet Current.

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