The View From My Front Door

Energy Revisited
In the 1960’s and the 70’s nuclear power plants were being proposed and built throughout the state of Washington. Puget Power was planning on building a twin power plant twenty minutes from my home in Skagit County. I contracted an incurable case of NIMBY. For six years of my life the fight was present in my daily routine.
Many questions about the fuel source were being discussed; meltdown due to malfunction or earthquake; terrorist attacks on the plants; where to store the spent fuel rods; how and where to store the radioactive material after it was used; how to mothball the contaminated plants after they were pulled off line.
During that time we heard numerous horror stories. Faulty welding jobs on the containment buildings that were covered up; spent fuel rods being storied in “swimming pools” next to the plants because there had not yet been an approved way of permanently disposing them underground in salt domes. Swimming pools being loaded beyond their designed capacity so that the water boiled from the hot fuel rods. The power plants were said to be constipated because there were no places to ship the spent rods. Massive storage areas in eastern Washington at the Hanford complex were leaking into the groundwater and into the Columbia River.
For twenty years I worked in the field dealing with the production of energy by reducing a home’s needs through energy conservation. During that time I worked on over three thousand homes in Skagit County to conserve energy through the federal low income weatherization program. The state program was called Energy Northwest: the Holistic Approach. I proudly wore the logo T- shirt for over a decade as I worked - house by house.
While conserving energy on the grassroots level, the state of Washington was pushing ahead to produce power on a regional level by building five massive nuclear power plants under the program called Washington Public Power Supply System or “Whoops” for short. Only one of the power plants was ever completed before the house of cards collapsed causing the largest municipal bond default in the history of the United States at 2.25 billion dollars. To pull Whoops out from the shadow of a bad track record they went on a search in 1998 to change their name in hopes of changing public opinion. And what did they decide on? “Energy Northwest” The state department that handles the weatherization program told WPPSS (Whoops) that the name was already taken and the name had a high quality standard in the field of energy conservation. But Big Government trumps small government and the agency was given $10,000 and told to cease and desist using the title. I was outraged. [Hanford News, November 20, 1998]

So in this year of 2008 the concept of powering up more nuclear power plants in a nation with an insatiable need for energy has brought the same old issues out on the table again. Has anything changed to the point that it is now a viable source? To me the crucial questions of thirty years ago were never asked and until they are brought out in the full light of day, discussed and correctly resolved, this source of power is not the legacy that I want to pass on to the generations following me.