(updated with video footage on February 24, 2019)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a meeting to discuss the status and solicit public input on the degrading concrete structures in the Seabrook Nuclear Plant. This hastily-convened public meeting (as a result of congressional intervention!) on Seabrook re-licensing in the face of ASR (aka, crumbling concrete) was held on February 13, 2019 in Hampton. Among other great testimony by C-10 folks and others, SAPL board member Bill Woodward and Doug Bogen were featured in a WMUR TV report.
SAPL President Herb Moyer videotaped the full hearing. Below is a selection of the testimony by SAPL and C-10, the Research and Education Foundation in Newburyport, MA.
Despite the NRC’s move to get the plant re-licensed being practically a fait-acompli, NextEra pulled out all the stops to get dozens of their employees and community boosters there. From the way Seabrook folks tell it, you’d think the only reason to keep the plant operating for another 30 years is its largely fictitious role in keeping climate-wrecking emissions down, rather than the highly subsidized profits they can continue to squeeze out it before it and other nukes get squeezed out of future energy markets!
Kudos to C-10 for persisting in their ASR intervention despite the daunting challenges, and for submitting an emergency petition to NRC to suspend the re-licensing prior to a formal hearing with C-10 later this year! (For those into the gory legal details, you can read the full petition text, which NHPR was nice enough to provide a link to in their report.)
The meeting was also covered by NHPR and the SeacoastOnline/Portsmouth Herald, of which Doug Bogen did at least get in the last word (literally). Read the article here »
Read the full emergency petition set forth by C-10 »
Related story: A step towards independent, off-site, real-time Radiological Monitoring