Following the March 24 demonstration in Brattleboro protesting the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, I talked with a shopkeeper about the issue.
“No tsunami is going to hit VY,” he said when the topic turned to the costs faced by Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. (Estimates range from $50 billion to $200 billion.)
This same sentiment was echoed by a supporter of the plant quoted in newspapers the next day: “They say they don't want a Fukushima here. We're not in a tsunami zone, so I don't think that's a problem.”
This tendency of people to narrow their scope when they think about possible disaster is understandable. A nuclear accident at Vermont Yankee is horrible to contemplate.
It could cause the indefinite evacuation of tens of thousands of people, just as Fukushima did. It could poison our waterway, the Connecticut River, affecting four states. It would likely shatter our sense of national social contract, as the Chernobyl disaster did in the USSR or as the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe is in Japan currently.
That's why we have to face the facts that go with such huge stakes.
The fact is, it could happen here - “it” being a natural catastrophic event that would turn this nuclear reactor and its over 1,000 tons of nuclear waste into our nightmare-come-true.
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Face “it”: climate change presents an unknowable set of risks. A fall report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change got headlines, “Extreme Weather the New Norm.”
Last spring's tornadoes that struck Springfield, Mass., are a case in point.
“I think everyone is surprised by the intensity of these tornadoes,” said a climatologist from the University of Massachusetts Climate Research Center. Part of a national, record-setting wave of tornadoes last year, this weather pattern was a local prelude to 2012's early tornado season, also linked to climate change.
How smart are we, then, to risk continued operation of an aged reactor whose spent fuel rods are stored 70 feet above the ground?
The threat of violent tornadoes is only part of the story.
In late August, a tropical storm, the remnants of a major hurricane, wiped out basic infrastructure in our region. In late October, a snowstorm punched out huge portions of the New England power grid. Electrical system failure was key to the Fukushima disaster.
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With federal license to operate for another 20 years, Vermont Yankee adds to all of our risks in the face of similarly unknown weather extremes and intensity.
And the costs associated with attempting to secure VY against such currently hard-to-assess risks will be one more albatross that we will bear as electric ratepayers.
As a math teacher, I am trained to see things in terms of trends. With VY, risk factors not only add up but also multiply in light of the increased likelihood of violent weather conjoined with old infrastructure and the owners' unreliable history in terms of maintenance and public disclosure.
And as a divinity school graduate, I am trained to see things in the long term. So it is said of Roman Catholicism's resilience, “The Vatican thinks in centuries.”
We can't afford to have a limited perspective when we consider the long term. And we can't allow ourselves narrow thinking like “a tsunami won't happen here.”
We need to think of our changing world and the world of our children and our children's children.
We need to join in one voice behind Vermont's leaders at the mass rally in Brattleboro on April 14.
It's time to shut the plant down.