Huge anti-nuke demo against Seabrook plant was 30 years ago
Huge anti-nuke demo against Seabrook plant was 30 years ago this weekend
The Associated Press
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Thirty years ago this weekend, hundreds of people opposed to nuclear power trekked down a dusty road and across the countryside, setting up camp next to piles of construction material destined to become the Seabrook nuclear power plant.
Police dragged or carried away 1,414 protesters on May 1, 1977, ending the skirmish but galvanizing the U.S. anti-nuclear movement.
Today, as energy prices skyrocket along with demands for energy sources with low carbon emissions, the nuclear energy industry is optimistic about a resurgence. And the anti-nuclear movement, including organizers of the Seabrook protests, is gearing up to respond.
Paul Gunter, who helped found the Clamshell Alliance that fought construction of the Seabrook Station, is as opposed as ever.
"To ante up for another generation of nuclear power would be a colossal mistake that would really trivialize the Seabrook debacle," he said.
Seabrook was proposed as a twin-reactor plant in 1972, at an estimated cost of $973 million, although when it finally won a commercial license in March 1990 it had been reduced to a single reactor and the cost had ballooned to $6.5 billion.
Protests started early.
The first person arrested at the future construction site was Ron Rieck, who spent 36 cold hours atop a weather observation tower in January 1976. Later that year, 18 people were arrested, then 180.
Arnie Alpert was an environmental science major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut when he learned of protests planned at Seabrook in 1977. After training in nonviolent resistance, he organized two busloads of students to go to the seaside plant site.
They became part of the Clamshell Alliance, which organized into small "affinity groups" for training, decision-making and support.
On April 30, members of the alliance approached the plant property from all directions, even through the ocean marshes. They walked onto the site unopposed and began setting up camp, including digging latrines, and holding meetings and celebrating.
"I was surprised we got onto the site at all," Alpert said.
Gov. Meldrim Thomson declared the demonstrations "a front for terrorist activity" and brought in a small army of National Guardsmen and police from around New England to respond.
"If I thought about it at all, it was a joke," Alpert said in a recent interview. "We knew we were not a group of terrorists. We knew we were a group of people passionately committed to nonviolence."
That Sunday, Thomson ordered the protesters to leave to avoid confrontations with construction workers due back Monday.
Those who didn't leave were arrested on trespassing charges and held for more than two weeks in National Guard armories around the state.
The protest attracted worldwide attention and sent ripples far beyond Seabrook.
"The Seabrook demonstration touched off a grass roots, nonviolent insurgency against nuclear power that led to the creation of similar alliances around the country," said Alpert, now the state program director for the American Friends Service Committee.
And he said the tactics and training spread to other causes, including peace and gay rights.
Thirty years after the Seabrook demonstrations, the participants' opinions are still strong.
Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said there is no room for nuclear energy, period.
"Our position is that they should have never built any of these in the first place," he said. "We went to jail to stop that. People should realize that we were right — and here we are 30 years after that demonstration and 50 years after the initiation of nuclear power and they still don't know what to do with the first cupful of nuclear waste."
While opponents warn of accidents, close calls and continued radiation releases, Seabrook spokesman Alan Griffin says the industry is safe and has a track record to prove it.
Alpert concedes the record is mixed.
"It may be not as bad as some of us thought it would be or thought it could be, but we still have dangers of catastrophic accidents and we still have persistent emissions of low-level radiation, of which the long-term health impacts are not fully understood."
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On the Net:
Seabrook Station: http://tinyurl.com/2mah7z
Clamshell Alliance: http://www.clamshell-tvs.org/
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/04/29/america/NA-GEN-US-Anti-nuclear-Anniversary.php
