Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
In Massachusetts, the chief of emergency management is objecting to a federal plan to allow owners of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station to cut the current 10-mile radius emergency evacuation zone down to the site’s property line. Samantha Phillips, director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, says the “all hazards plan” the state uses for other emergencies would not provide an adequate response for a radiation release. The reactor, near Plymoth on Cape Cod Bay, closed last May 31st. Phillips said the licenced emergency planning for the zone around the reactor should remain in place until all 3,000 waste uranium fuel rod assemblies—now being cooled in a deep pool on site—are transferred to heavy steel and cement dry casks. “The [State’s] overriding interest at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is to maintain public safety,” Phillips says in her letter to Scott Wall, manager of the Division of Operating Reactor Licensing, a branch of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “While the type and probability of public safety risks at a nuclear power station evolve and reflect whether a plant is active or inactive, a nuclear power station undergoing decommissioning and deconstruction nonetheless presents substantial and complex risks to public safety, especially when spent fuel remains in the spent fuel pool.” In the United States, 23 closed nuclear reactors are being decommissioned and thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste fuel remain on site in cooling pools or dry cask storage. —Excerpted from an article by Christine Legere, Cape Cod Times, Nov. 25, 2019
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