Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE) has petitioned the NRC to suspend the license of FitzPatrick until there is a thorough review of their woefully inadequate venting system and until there is one or more public hearings. Today, staffer of AGREE (Jessica Azulay) and Paul Gunter (Beyond Nuclear, a national organization) spoke in person before the NRC Petition Review Board near Washington, D.C. while three others spoke by phone. Chapter member Linda DeStefano’s statement to the NRC is below. Nice work, Linda – Jessica Helm, Sierra Club

Statement made by Linda DeStefano to the NRC Petition Review Board today, 4.18.12

I’m the representative from the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club to the Alliance for a Green Economy. The Atlantic Chapter covers NYS and has 37,500 members. The Chapter is part of the national Sierra Club. The national Sierra Club has a long history of speaking out about the problems with nuclear energy. These problems include the intractable problem of nuclear waste, the record of serious accidents both in the U.S. and other countries, the possibility of a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility, the prohibitive cost of nuclear energy that is subsidized with our taxes while renewable forms of energy receive relatively little governmental assistance.

The nuclear power plant in question before us today, FitzPatrick, has all these problems plus additional ones. It is a G.E. Mark 1 boiling water reactor, the same as those which failed at Fukushima – with disastrous consequences. There are several other such facilities in the U.S. but FitzPatrick has the additional drawback of being the only one which has not followed the long-standing advice of the NRC to install a hardened vent. The existing venting system is woefully inadequate. In an accident, it’s so-called solution is to release radioactivity at ground level into the environment. FitzPatrick should NOT be put into the same category as the other Mark 1 reactors in terms of license renewal until 2016 as it is the only one without the hardene vent.

More than 900,000 people live within 50 miles of FitzPatrick.
Syracuse is only 36 miles away from FitzPatrick. As someone who lives just outside Syracuse, I feel personally threatened. And I worry for all living things that would be faced with dangerous doses of radioactivity. Our area has farmland and beautiful natural areas. We have Lake Ontario – one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the U.S. I don’t understand how Entergy’s interest in saving a relatively small amount of money by refusing to install a hardened vent can be weighed against the economic, health and environmental disaster that a serious accident or terrorist attack would entail. The Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club asks that the NRC regard our safety as more important than Entergy’s bottom line.

Linda A. DeStefano
member of the Energy Committee
Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club
New York State