SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Looking Back At Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant And The Protests That Stopped It

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“Shoreham Action Is One Of The Largest Held Worldwide,” was the headline in The New York Times about an event on June 3, 1979. The article told of how “more than 600 protesters were arrested” at the site of the then under-construction Shoreham nuclear power plant and “15,000 demonstrators gathered” on the beach fronting the plant in the protest of it.

That action was important in stopping the Shoreham plant from going into operation—and preventing LILCO from building a total of seven to 11 nuclear power plants on Long Island.

Last week, on Facebook and in email-communication, that event 40 years ago was heralded as a turning point for Long Island—and indeed it was.

On Facebook, Catherine Green of Sayville, a founder of the SHAD (Sound-Hudson Against Atomic Development) Alliance which organized the protest, wrote about being part of a “committed band of activists…protesting the nuclear power that powerful corporate forces were trying to shove down out throats…Eventually we won, but not before we had committed civil disobedience repeatedly…Not before we had systematically thrown out every pro-nuclear official in [Suffolk] county government and elected an anti-nuke legislature. Not before our dogged grassroots educating coupled with the shock of Three Mile Island had turned the tide of public opinion. It took 25 years.”

Civil disobedience and political work were big parts of the challenge to LILCO’s plan to turn Long Island—in the jargon of the atomic promoters then—into a “nuclear park.”

There was an array of complementing strategies—including lawsuits, insistence by Suffolk government that there could be no successful evacuation from Long Island in the event a major nuclear plant accident, and the use by the state of its power of condemnation. The Long Island Power Authority was created with the power to seize LILCO’s stocks and assets and eliminate it as a corporate entity if it persisted in its nuclear scheme.

That huge demonstration on June 3, part of an International Antinuclear Day, encapsulated the strong resistance on Long Island to the LILCO nuclear push. The protesters, enduring rain, heard from speakers and were sung to by folk singer Pete Seeger who described the “immoral” basis of nuclear power.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania had recently happened. To come were the Chernobyl and, most recently, the Fukushima catastrophes.

Jack Huttner, also a founder of the SHAD Alliance, commented last week on email, “What I miss the most…that feeling that I/we could do anything.”

Mitch Cohen responded: “Jack, we COULD (do anything), we DID, and we SHALL!!!” Mr. Cohen has, not too incidentally, continued as an activist as have a good number of others who were involved in the Long Island anti-nuclear fight. Mr. Cohen is editor of a powerful just-published book, “The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup, The Politics of Pesticides.”

LILCO announced its plan for the Shoreham nuclear plant, what was supposed to be the first of the many, with an April 13, 1966 press release. It said the cost of Shoreham would be “in the $65-$75 million range.” I reprinted the release as a facsimile in a book on the Long Island nuclear drive that I wrote titled “Power Crazy.” 

The final price—in the $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion range—was a 10,000% cost overrun.

It would have been the most expensive nuclear plant per kilowatt of electricity ever built.

Now that stands to be beaten. Nuclear power plants, besides being terribly dangerous, are terribly expensive. The only two nuclear power plants now under construction in the U.S. are plants named Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia—now projected to each cost $13 billion. 

The economics of nuclear power, once described by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss as “too cheap to meter,” were not only grossly underestimated—so have  been the dangers. As then LILCO Chairman Charles Pierce told the Suffolk County Legislature in 1983, the probability of a major nuclear plant accident at Shoreham was once every 500 million years.  In fact, we are seeing a major nuclear power plant accident occurring about every decade, with less than 500 nuclear plants in the world.

Still, the nuclear push continues. As Scott Denman, long executive director of the Safe Energy Communication Council, said in last week’s email traffic on the Shoreham protest, “Nearly 100 reactors still operate [in the U.S.] and billions in bailouts for uneconomic reactors to remain on-line have been given away in NY, CT, NJ, IL and now likely OH and maybe even PA and other states. Billions more are now being lavished via current federal r&d on new reactor concepts no matter how…grossly expensive, dangerous and uncompetitive they are. Nuclear power is far from ended and is rather a clear and present danger….Our work is far from done; indeed it’s just beginning.”

But because of that June 3, 1979 protest and decades of painstaking and difficult struggle, LILCO was stopped in its nuclear push and Long Island today is nuclear-free.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.