This is the first of a two-part column on nuclear power in Plymouth.
The 1972 opening of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant might have been the worst thing to happen in Plymouth’s long history. It ushered in an era of fool’s gold prosperity that, over time, exacted a steep price on what was a quintessential sleepy town. Today, Pilgrim’s lingering side effects – including more than five dozen casks filled with radioactive waste at the ocean’s edge – offer a cautionary lesson for those who believe building a new, albeit smaller, reactor is an idea worth exploring.
First, a condensed telling of the backstory.
Once the plant was up and running, millions upon millions of tax dollars began flowing into the town’s bank account. The economic bonanza made living here artificially cheap, keeping real estate taxes suppressed and sparking a housing boom that exceeded today’s growth rate. At its zenith in the mid-seventies, the plant accounted for half of Plymouth’s tax revenue, about $13 million. In today’s dollars, it would be worth north of $75 million.
Year after year, officials used the rewards from that radioactive lottery ticket to fund the budget, instead of putting some of it in a “rainy day” fund. Before long, those three-bedroom houses that sprouted like weeds were filled with thousands of kids who also sprouted like weeds. It required more schools, more services. No problem – power plant dough came to the rescue.
Until it didn’t.
While Pilgrim brought money and jobs, it also introduced troubles in the form of health and safety concerns and – later – a blooming fiscal crisis.
When operating at peak output – about 680 megawatts – the Manomet plant generated enough electricity to power more than a half million homes. By the 1980s, however, its management was under scrutiny. Emergency shutdowns, or “scrams,” became common. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials started visiting Plymouth with the regularity of students on Mayflower II field trips.
The plant’s issues were usually attributed to some kind of mechanical failure that didn’t put the public at risk – according to Boston Edison, its owner at the time. As confidence in Pilgrim’s safety eroded, questions about cancer-causing radiation grew. Many residents began to worry that in return for subsidized tax bills they were paying a price in the form of risks that were hard to quantify.
In 1986, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited Pilgrim as one of the country’s “worst-run” nuclear facilities. It went offline in April of that year for an overhaul and didn’t begin generating electricity again until 1999, over the protests of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
“We will do whatever we possibly can legally, through the attorney general, to ensure that the plant doesn’t operate,” a Dukakis spokesperson said at the time. ”We still believe the plant is not ready for restart.”
Mary Lampert, for decades the force behind the nonprofit Pilgrim Watch, remembers hoping the plant would stay permanently shut. From her home in Duxbury, she could see the reactor poking above the Manomet coastline, a reminder of a looming danger marring her million-dollar view. Through the years, Lampert collected anecdotal evidence of an apparent cancer cluster in the well-off enclave. Among the cases there was a neighbor with thyroid cancer. Another developed breast cancer. Someone else was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
“There were other people the neighborhood with similar radiation-related diseases,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “I thought, ‘This isn’t normal.’ I didn’t know anybody with these diseases before we moved there.”
But evidence directly linking Pilgrim to increased cancer rates was fuzzy and the NRC allowed the plant to ramp up despite objections from state and local officials, as well as the swelling ranks of protestors.
Then it shut down again. Then it restarted. The pattern became as predictable as it was problematic.
I was editor of the Old Colony Memorial at the time. Stories about the plant’s problems routinely made front-page news. Journalists were sometimes invited to go into the reactor building, ostensibly to see firsthand that all was well. But how were we to know for sure?
As a precaution, we were given dosimeter badges to detect any radiation exposure. On one occasion, a letter arrived at the OCM saying a badge analysis showed my body had not been exposed to radioactivity during a recent visit. That would have been reassuring except for one crucial piece of overlooked information: A last-minute schedule conflict caused me to cancel the appointment. The fact that Pilgrim officials did not know I wasn’t on the grounds that day became another page one story.
There were many such incidents over the years, including the time in 1987 when a plant operator fell asleep in the control room, and another in 1991 when an operator showed up to work with alcohol on his breath. He was second in command on that shift.
Other mishaps involved safety relief valve failures, steam leaks, electrical issues, and turbine malfunctions. Separately, none rose to the Three-Mile Island level, but collectively the plant’s issues gathered like a dark cloud over Plymouth. Some people chose to live in denial, joking about being vaporized in a “meltdown,” a fate not backed up by science.
Boston Edison sold Pilgrim to Louisiana- based Entergy in 1999. The state helped local officials negotiate an agreement to keep payments from falling off a cliff as the plant aged and shed value, like a car that had frequently been in the shop and was now chugging through its last miles.
Unplanned shutdowns persisted – but they typically lasted for days or weeks, not months and years. By 2015, the NRC had put Pilgrim on a kind of death watch, increasing oversight to an even higher level. That did little to assuage public fears. The agency was viewed as being beholden to the nuclear industry. It periodically held public mertings in town, during which more questions were evaded than answered.
Revenue from Pilgrim stayed steady as late as 2019 – fluctuating between $8 million and $10 million annually.
On May 31, 2019, Pilgrim stopped producing power. Three months later, Holtec International took over and began the decade-long decommissioning process. Another deal was struck to stagger the inevitable drop-off in payments that was to follow. In fiscal year 2021, the number was $6.5 million. For 2026, it’s down to about $1.9 million. You can see where this is going. There isn’t much of a market for a nuclear waste dump
Contrary to a widely held belief, neither anti-nuclear activists nor the NRC brought about the plant’s closure. Its demise was all about money – Entergy wasn’t making any from Pilgrim. Repair costs were mounting, yes, but the biggest factor in was cheap natural gas, thanks to fracking. The high-pressure drilling technique allowed companies to release huge reserves from deep underground. Nuclear power was expensive.
Today, Holtec is mired in controversy as it dismantles the plant and banks a tidy profit. The state last year rejected its request to dump 800,000 gallons of treated radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay, even as the company is allowed to slowly evaporate radioactive water above it. The security of spent fuel rods, stored close to Rocky Hill Road, also remains contentious.
Attention has turned to the 1,600 acres Holtec owns around the plant site. There has been talk about the town buying the land, were the company to put it up for sale. Given the state of Plymouth’s municipal budget, the price tag may be too steep.
Sketchy conceptual plans call for recreational trails, a modest retail component – and maybe an SMR, or small modular reactor. Only a few such facilities operate worldwide, none of them in the U.S. The timeline for approval and construction would be arduous and lengthy – a decade or more – and the benefits questionable. Some local supporters view an SMR as a potential path to fiscal stability. Critics say enough already – Plymouth is fated to host a nuclear waste site that has a shelf life of at least 10,000 years.
More on all that in part two. Meantime, I’ll refer you that dusty adage about those who fail to learn from history.
Mark Pothier can be reached at mark@plymouthindependent.org.