Ray Shadis renews his anti-nuclear message

By Steve Cartwright
Thursday, April 21, 2011

Ray Shadis of Edgecomb, Maine’s elder anti-nuclear statesman

Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company is still in business but only because it still must store the plant’s spent nuclear fuel.

Artist Ray Shadis of Edgecomb has worked for decades to steer Maine and the nation away from the perils of nuclear power. Shadis led the effort to shut down Maine Yankee in Wiscasset. Now an elder statesman of the anti-nuclear movement, he was recently recognized for his relentless efforts by the National Environmental Hall of Fame.

Most recently, Shadis, 69, spearheaded a five-year legal fight over Vermont Yankee's nuclear power plant that ended March 10 when the federal government renewed the plant's license for 20 years. The next day, the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was destroyed. The most heavily damaged of the Japanese reactors is the same design as the Vernon, Vermont, plan. Vermont's governor has vowed to enforce the state Legislature's decision to shut down the plant by March 2012. On Monday (April 18) Entergy, corporate owner of Vermont Yankee, filed suit against Gov. Peter Shumlin in an attempt to overturn Vermont's action.

Just days ago, Shadis and his group Friends of the Coast joined others in a legal challenge to the 20-year relicensing of New Hampshire's Seabrook plant.

Friends of the Coast started on Earth Day, April 22, 1995, with a goal of closing Maine Yankee in three years. Shadis had already long been involved in Maine referendums to close the plant, which went online in 1972. The Friends pressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to conduct a safety inspection of the plant. The inspection discovered serious safety concerns, including cracks in steam generator tubes that had gone unnoticed. In August 1997, the plant's board of directors, having decided repairs would cost too much, voted to close it permanently. The decommissioning of the plant was finished in 2005.

But the high-level radioactive waste lives on. All spent fuel rods from Maine Yankee are stored at Wiscasset in steel casks that officials say will last 100 years; the Maine Yankee web site calls it an "interim" solution because the U.S. Department of Energy is responsible for creating and maintaining a national long-term storage site. The Yucca Mountain site in Nevada remains in political limbo and high-level radioactive waste remains stored on-site at nuclear facilities. Maine Yankee uses dry cask storage containers, airtight steel canisters housed inside concrete and steel casks on concrete pads.

Shadis believes the 900 tons of waste at Wiscasset is safe from natural disaster, but not necessarily from the impact of an aircraft or "malevolent acts."

"This is extraordinarily deadly stuff and there is an awful lot of it. There must be no chance of it being turned loose on the environment," he said. "You don't want to take any chances."

Shadis said it's mind-boggling that society is leaving this dangerous legacy for generations to come. "It's poison. It's terribly toxic. It's carcinogenic. It's mutagenic. The (Maine Yankee) plant provided power for one generation, now you're storing the stuff for five or more generations. I just don't see the equity in that."

Shadis warns that aging nuclear reactors - he calls them "zombie" plants - should be retired. Instead, he says, they are being relicensed by government officials under political pressure. The federal government has approved 63 out of 63 relicensing applications. "In an effort to keep a dying industry alive, NRC is grandfathering in obsolete designs which could not be licensed under today's standards," he said. Vermont Yankee was built in 1972 and its major components were designed to operate for 40 years.

Shadis said the nuclear industry today is on "life support," unable to raise capital except through government subsidy. Despite President Obama's endorsement of nuclear power, no new plants are under construction. It's far cheaper and safer to build wind farms for electricity, Shadis said. In the 1960s, Maine Yankee came with a price tag of about $350 million. In the 1980s, the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire cost several billion dollars. A new plant today would run as high as $14 billion, he said.

Trying to bring about a "nuclear renaissance" is going backward, Shadis said, and "a distraction from real solutions." The world needs to move forward with wind and solar technology, he said. "The world simply can't afford to build enough nukes fast enough to offset the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. If you put the engineering into nonpolluting, nonthreatening energy sources, including energy efficiency, you could offset the emissions."

"I think there will be a real time of travail for what we have done to the environment," said Shadis, who has six grown children. "A lot of what we've done is coming back to bite us. The only public policy should be to protect the environment."

Meanwhile, he said, "the lessons from Japan are riding on the wind."

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NEC, organized and founded in 1971, is the region’s sole advocate for environmental and nuclear safety with intervenor status in the Entergy Vermont Yankee federal relicensing process, and is an intervenor in two open dockets before the Vermont Public Service Board Docket 7440 – Shall Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee receive a CPG for an additional years of operation and less widely reported Docket 7600 – opened as a result of Entergy’s misinformation in Docket 7440, re: underground pipes and groundwater contamination.

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