The New England Coalition is a non-profit educational organization. Originally the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, it was founded in February of 1971 by several groups of citizens and scientists from Vermont and western Massachusetts concerned about the nation’s growing civilian nuclear power program.
The Coalition participated as a full party in United States government licensing proceedings for Seabrook, Vermont Yankee, and two other plants now cancelled. Beginning in 1973, our attorneys argued that the Seabrook reactor is not safely sited, adequately designed, or properly built. We presented testimony showing that the nuclear reactor power plant is not safe, economical or needed, and that adequate emergency planning is not possible.
In 1990, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) waved its own rules regarding emergency planning in order to grant Seabrook an operating license. Such a course of action flies in the face of the claim that the industry and its regulators have learned the lessons of Three Mile Island. If the NRC can continue to reduce its own safety standards, everyone in the country will be at greater risk. The Coalition’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
Our legal efforts have also included interventions before the NRC to challenge Vermont Yankee’s plans to increase — once in 1977 and again in 1987 — its on-site storage capacity for highly radioactive “spent” fuel.
Beginning in 1989, the Coalition became actively involved in an educational effort concerning radioactive waste “disposal” in Vermont. The Coalition helped write Vermont’s Act 296, an innovative and precedent-setting radioactive waste disposal law, and has participated actively in rulemakings and all hearings, proceedings and workshops on the subject.
Additionally, we filed a petition in conjunction with the Union of Concerned Scientists, to shut down Yankee Rowe, the nation’s oldest commercial reactor. In January of 1992, the plant was permanently closed.
Since 1999, we have intervened in three proceedings before the Vermont Public Service Board to stop the sale of the Vermont Yankee to out-of-state merchant generators.
- Facts revealed in the first proceeding, which lasted for 15 months, resulted in the first proposal for a sale of the plant to Amergen to be rejected.
- During the second proceeding, the sale of VY to a shell subsidiary of Entergy Corp, we were able to have conditions inserted into the Public Service Board's (PSB) order that set the stage for our current intervention in the extended power uprate case.
- We have been waging the fight against the proposed extended power uprate before the PSB, before the Vermont State Senate, the Vermont House of Representatives, the New Hampshire Senate, the Massachusetts legislature, and through the media before the court of public opinion.
Resources for public education include the Great New England Energy Show mobile van; an extensive library of books and films, including “At Home with the Sun” , a solar energy book for young scientists; a speaker’s bureau, and the newsletter On the Watch. Coalition trustees and members have worked with numerous local, regional and national organizations in the quest for a safer energy future.