Bogen: Court's Denial Lacks 'Common Sense'

By Doug Bogen

Executive director of the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League

Friday’s decision by a Boston federal court to deny an appeal by three environmental groups challenging the 20-year license extension application for the Seabrook, NH nuclear reactor ignores the meaningful contribution to jobs and the environment that renewable energy could provide instead, the groups’ spokespeople said.

The groups -- Beyond Nuclear, the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League and the New Hampshire Chapter of the Sierra Club -- had petitioned the court requesting admission into a public hearing process before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to challenge an application for the twenty-year license extension of the Seabrook nuclear generating station in Seabrook, New Hampshire from 2030 to 2050. But a panel of federal appellate court judges in Boston denied the request.

“Its ludicrous that the nuke can request a twenty-year license extension twenty years before its current license expires,” said Paul Gunter, Director of Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear, based in Takoma Park, MD.  “It sets up the Catch-22 at Seabrook where the review of less harmful energy alternatives must be framed in a crystal ball,” he said.  “The result is the denial of a meaningful review of wind energy in the Gulf of Maine to replace another twenty years of nuclear risk and waste at Seabrook,” he said. 

The three groups had appealed the nuclear agency Commissioners’ reversal of its own Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB) that had originally admitted the groups into a hearing on the requested license extension. The federal court upheld the ruling by the Commissioners on appeal by Seabrook operators, NextEra Energy, that the licensing board had erred in admitting the groups’ challenge based on sufficient evidence of the emerging energy alternative of interconnected offshore wind turbine farms in the Gulf of Maine servicing the regional power needs by 2030.

"I've increasingly had the suspicion that our justice system is sometimes lacking in common sense concern for the public interest when it comes to corporate and governmental prerogatives,” said Doug Bogen, Executive Director of Seacoast Anti-Pollution League. “This ruling appears to confirm that suspicion," he said. "NRC intransigence in addition to state government inaction has practically guaranteed that the public will have no voice when it comes to a key future energy policy decision -- the re-licensing of our local nuclear plant," Bogen concluded.

The court denial of a hearing under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) comes just weeks after the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $200 million for U.S. offshore wind power development including two grants at $4 million each for commercial projects in the Gulf of Maine with potential for an additional $93 million. The University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composite Center was awarded $4 million to install two pilot 6-megawatt direct-drive turbines in the Gulf of Maine several miles offshore of Monhegan Island.

The second $4 million award went to Statoil North America of Stamford, Connecticut for its plan to deploy four 3-megawatt wind turbines on floating spar buoy structures in the Gulf of Maine off Boothbay Harbor at a water depth of approximately 460 feet.

The deployments are part of the State’s stepping stone approach to generate 5,000 megawatts  (5 Gigawatts), or four times the Seabrook nuclear plant's electricity output, through a series of interconnected commercial wind farms floating in deep water ten to fifty miles out in the Gulf of Maine by 2030, the same year that Seabrook plans to start its twenty-year license extension. 

These awards keep Maine on track to meet the 2030 goal for offshore wind commercial operation as presented in the environmental groups' initial petition and arguments before the NRC.  "The dismissal by NextEra, the Commission and now the court ignore the many reasonable and concrete steps that continue to advance the progress of renewable energy as a viable alternative to increasingly expensive, dangerous and polluting nuclear power," said Gunter.

"It appears that another branch of the federal government - the Energy Department - has a more optimistic view of offshore wind development than does the one we're up against", said Bogen. " Despite this setback, perhaps we'll all live to see the folly of NRC's  'entertain no objections' approach to nuclear plant relicensing as offshore wind overtakes nuclear and other dirty sources in the electricity market over the next decade or two," he concluded.

The federal court ruling dated January 4, 2013 can be viewed at http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/seabrook-renewables/seabrook-appeal/seab_lra_1stcirc_01042013_denial_review.pdf