Now, wait, I know what you're saying -- not another disaster post? This is not "disasterbation," as one commenter I read elsewhere call it. I do not enjoy the fact that we have a serious problem here, but we do.
The U.S. happens to have many aging nuclear plants within short ranges of major metro areas and major fault lines -- and a few that fall within both. One of them just so happens to be firmly planted within range of making the entire metro Boston region, and my backyard, potentially uninhabitable: Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant.
And, oh, by the way, it poses the second biggest risk for an earthquake-related nuclear disaster in the entire country.
What would happen if disaster struck?
Closer:
Superimposing a transparent version of a picture of the Chernobyl disaster over a Google map picture with Pilgrim pinned, made to scale, we see the true extent of the damage that would take place under a worst-case scenario. It's not pretty.
Large swaths of Greater Boston would have been flagged "closed," as they charitably describe the dead-zones surrounding Chernobyl. Almost the entire metro area would have been flagged either a partial or permanent "control zone," likely including the entirety of the city of Boston. And what about all that radioactive fallout that would have been dumped into Massachusetts Bay? What would the consequences of that have been for the entire North Atlantic? Incalculable, I'd imagine.
Well, "disasterbation" or not, this could happen here. This is real. Unlikely? Yes, but ask Mr. Murphy what he thinks about that. The disastrous and unlikely has a way of happening -- whether it's here, or somewhere else. Ask the Japanese what they think of the unlikely scenario.
The fact of the matter is there's no real off switch to this sort of nuclear reactor, the same GE models used at Fukushima -- and whether people realize it or not, Massachusetts actually gets legitimate earthquakes, enough to do serious damage to the region at large.
As one local pol put it (my own, in fact), nuclear power "is an elaborate, risky, and expensive way to boil water to turn a turbine." This is a serious problem that deserves a serious amount of attention, and quite likely a difficult set of choices. And this is just one, among many, of our aging plants that deserve to be looked at.
And the only plant viewed as a higher risk? That one's right next to New York City.