Seabrook Nuclear Plant: Perception and Reality

Today, at 12:30 PM the sirens will sound from Massachusetts down the New Hampshire seacoast to the Piscataqua River, and they will be heard across the river, in Maine, at the Portsmouth Naval Yard. 

These sirens are placed to alert all those living within a 10 mile radius of the plant they must leave their homes, or "shelter in place" in the event of an accident, a tsunami, an earthquake (which we've had lately) which will cause release of a radioactive cloud over that 20 mile diameter surrounding the plant. 

When Mad Dog was growing up in the Washington, DC metro area, he was accustomed to those yellow painted sirens on poles near elementary schools, fire houses, playing fields. They would occasionally, usually without warning, blast off, causing people to pause to consider whether or not this was Armageddon or not, whether or not the missiles were on their way to obliterate us.  Of course, we had practiced diving under our desks at school in the mid 1950's, but by the mid 1960's everyone agreed diving under your desk was not likely to protect you from a nuclear bomb.

When Mad Dog left Washington, DC and moved to seacoast New Hampshire, he said one thing he was happy to leave behind was the threat of instant nuclear annihilation, or becoming the target of a terrorist dirty bomb, on the theory terrorists would not likely waste a nuclear bomb on New Hampshire. Only after he moved into his house did he realize he was only 2 miles down wind from the Seabrook nuclear plant, which is actually, virtually, in Hampton Falls. 

Mad Dog thought back to the talk Senator Gale McGee  delivered when Mad Dog was a tender 13 years old. The children of Congressmen and Senators were students at the local suburban public schools--Western Junior High School, Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School, Walt Whitman High School. So, it was commonplace for someone's father, who was a Congressman or Senator, to come out to give a talk to a student assembly. McGee was from Wyoming, and he gave a speech he had given many times to be sure, about a man who was sick of worrying about Russian nuclear bombs blowing him up in his Chevy Chase home, so he moved to Montana, where he could be safe from the nuclear threat, only to find he had built his home just down the road from a field of missile silos, sure to attract Russian missiles.. The message was, we are all in this together; there is no escape from nuclear holocaust. 

Fukishima has now brought home the likelihood of another possibility: Beyond worries about human error, human malevolence, terrorist attacks, is the worry about what nature, perhaps stoked by the new weather extremes of a warming planet, might do to a nuclear plant on an ocean coast.

Seabrook has applied for another 50 years of operation.  The people of the seacoast do not need its power, and its not clear who else might benefit from its presence. But, most of Mad Dog's neighbors in Hampton don't think about the plant. There were demonstrations against it when it was being built, with citizens handcuffing themselves to the wire fences around the plant. But now, the citizens of Seabrook, Hampton, North Hampton, Rye and Portsmouth just don't think about it.

Until the sirens go off.