Huge Anti-Nuke Demo was 30 Years Ago This Week
CONCORD, N.H. — Thirty years ago this week, hundreds of anti-nuclear demonstrators trekked down a dusty road and set 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 a national anti-nuclear movement that moved from Seabrook’s marshes to national money markets to effectively halt orders for new plants in the United States.
Fast forward to today.
With energy prices skyrocketing, global warming, and calls for cleaner energy abounding, the nuclear 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 has made opposing nuclear power his career, is one.
“To ante up for another generation of nuclear power would be a collossal mistake that would really trivialize the Seabrook debacle,” he said. “Because right now we have maybe 10 to 20 years to make some very critical energy policy decisions that affect global climate.”
Seabrook was proposed as a twin-reactor plant in 1972, at an estimated cost of $973 million. When it finally won a commercial license in March 1990, it was a single reactor and cost $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. Then came April 1977.
Arnie Alpert was an environmental science major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut when he learned of planned protests at Seabrook. After training in nonviolent resistance, he organized two busloads of students to travel to Seabrook.
They became part of the Clamshell Alliance, an umbrella group that organized into small “affinity groups” for training, decision-making and support. On April 30, they approached the plant property from all directions, even through the ocean swamps.
Gov. Meldrim Thomson said the demonstrations were “a front for terrorist activity” and organized 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.”
The group walked onto the site, unopposed, and immediately began setting up camp, digging latrines, having meetings and celebrating.
“I was surprised we got onto the site at all,” Alpert said.
The next day, a Sunday, Thomson ordered the protesters to leave to avoid confrontations with construction workers due back Monday.
Those who didn’t leave - 1,414 strong - 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 grassroots, nonviolent insurgency against nuclear power that led to the creation of similar alliances around the country,” said Alpert. And he said the tactics and training spread to other causes, including peace and gay rights.
Now, some former Clamshell members find themselves focusing anew on nuclear power.
Spurred by skyrocketing energy prices, global warming, and calls for cleaner energy, the industry is making a comeback. New federal laws have streamlined permitting and construction and removed much of the financial risk, and the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute says construction could start on multiple plants by around 2010.
At Seabrook, spokesman Alan Griffith recalls being in high school during the first anti-Seabrook demonstrations, then covering protests as a reporter and editor.
He said streamlining licensing would have helped Seabrook, which was ready to run in 1986, but not fully licensed for four more years.
“I get paid to say this stuff, but I truly believe as a person that this country must have more nuclear power plants for reasons that have become crystal clear over time,” Griffith said.
“It is the only major source of electricity that is able to generate electricity cleanly, with no greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “The anti’s have a different perspective on that, but that is one of the main reasons of the resurgence.”
But Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project at the anti-nuclear Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said there is no room for nuclear, 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.”
With no national repository, nuclear waste is being stored at nuclear plants, as “pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction,” Gunter said.
Griffith responds thdat whether a repository is built or not, nuclear plants “have the ability to safely and securely store their waste.”
And so the debate goes. Each argument has 180-degree opposite answers, including on questions of safety.
Gunter and Alpert, state program director for the American Friends Service Committee, maintain that much more energy could be saved and created if nuclear subsidies went instead to more efficient appliances, increased conservation and renewable sources.
John H. Sununu, former governor, engineer and sometime nuclear industry consultant, couldn’t disagree more. He said the long nuclear hiatus squandered an opportunity to provide clean energy much earlier, and it’s time to acknowledge it was a mistake.
“I hope it lays the foundation for a much better response by the nation as the second round of opportunity of getting away from coal and oil and natural gas occurs,” he said.
On the Net:
Clamshell Alliance: www.clamshell-tvs.org
Nuclear Energy Institute: www.nei.org
Nuclear Information and Resource Service: www.nirs.org
Seabrook Station, Florida Power & Light: www.fpl.com
Copyright 2007 Associated Press
And who here remembers the May 6th Coalition, the HUGE 1979 anti-nuclear demonstration on the steps of the Capitol in DC? The voices of the half million + people were loud and clear. And there are STILL better, cheaper, and cleaner ways to boil water. They just don’t make huge profits or pull in fat federal subsidies.
All youse nuke advocates can get back to your research labs and contact us when you make some real advances.
Alas, all three democratic “front runners” - Clinton, Obama and Edwards -l are pushing
nuclear power as the best way of dealing with global warming.
Well, convincing one of those Democrats that ‘nukes’ should not be an option for energy will be a necessity….we are at a turning point with energy policy in this country. It must be now that safe, alternative energy is backed by the government…. that and national health insurance.
Did anyone see NOVA on April 24th? “Saved by the Sun” It can happen! Yes it can. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/
How many billions do you suppose we’ve poured into Iraq. Where could we be with solar right NOW, if we had invested 1/2 of that money in developing solar energy?
I’ve come to conclude that even if we dismiss safety, the fact that we’re offloading waste to centuries of future generations, total cost of ownership, etc. that nuclear power has one extraordinary deficit even if it runs perfectly. Namely, that it’s a fascistic form of energy. That is, nobody asks for one in their backyard, the conception, construction, operation, waste management, etc. is all top-down, federal, non-local, never community-owned.
That’s a pretty severe break from wind, solar, geothermal, etc. in which a community (even a private individual) might own and control the destiny over. It’s totally contrary to Green, anarchist, populist, progressive, grassroots, democratic and like-thinking.
http://paulbramscher.blogspot.com/2007/04/american-public-media-and-pro-nuke.html
Thanks for the link Florence!! I’ve been trying to get our county in GA to adopt building codes which use self sustaining energy technologies. It is an uphill battle but one well worth fighting. We have to start small to get big as far raising the consciousness of Americans regarding renewable energies. So much misinformation has been put forth that you have to spend the time it takes to wade through it all and debunk it. Keep the faith!!
I was “locked up” in one of those armories 30 years ago….didn’t mean to go so far with the event, but the response of the police left me without choice. We were certainly not terrorists, but I felt like one when the evening before helicopters with their search lights flew over us all night. The next day people “went limp’ to be brought to the waiting buses. The police left no doubt about who was paying their salaries as they dragged many of us over the telephone poles that were on the ground as markers for the parking lot.
‘Nukes’ are centralized and can be controlled….the alternatives are localized.
We must get Obama or another frontrunner to change their view on nuclear power as The energy soource.
It’s all about how we get our energy as consumers. Corporate enegry concerns are ALWAYS aimed at chaining the people to non-renewable ever-billable types of energy- including, as our oh-so-smart president is so fond of saying, Nuke-U-Lur. Why let the people power their TV sets with the sun and wind for free (with a one-time cost) when we can charge them per second for our dirty energy forever?
NO INVESTOR will touch Nuclear power without complete liability protection from the government at unlimited taxpayer expense.
Externalizing the cost of energy is the key to the entire coal, oil, gas, and nuclear industry.
All forms of transportation especially air and automobile are also subsidized and costs externalized as well.
These shortsighted policies are a result of the best government corporations can buy. Continued corporate control will lead to changes that make these problems worse and create new ones.
We should just put large $ at each Walmart and corporate office for genuflecting and human sacrifice to show our real god.
I am a documentary filmmaker. I have just released on DVD a new digitally re-mastered version of my documentary, SEABROOK 1977. This film chronicles the story of 2,000 members of the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, attempting to block construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire in May 1977, when 1,414 people were arrested and jailed en masse in National Guard armories for two weeks.
SEABROOK 1977 tells the story of this seminal event of 1970’s environmental activism.
As the Bush Administration is currently pushing for an expansion of nuclear power plants to be built in the United States, the experiences of 1970’s anti-nuclear activists are more relevant than ever.
“SEABROOK 1977 is an invaluable historical document.”
—Howard Zinn, author of A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
For more information, visit: http://www.turningtide.com/SEABROOK.htm
Robbie Leppzer
robbie@turningtide.com