Talk:Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant

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As I found it, the article was barely comprehensible. I decided to make only the most superficial changes, and to leave it to a later author to tell the full story properly. Simesa 01:45, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The "twin" Millstone 1 plant was ordered in '66, Shoreham in '65, something like 570 MWe. Shoreham had a delay and GE talked LILCO into replacing the "Millstone twin" (veritaqble quads with Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee) with the larger, then current revised design BWR, something like 840 MWe. The quads were built in the '67-'72 time frame, for $100-$350 million each. (There are noit necessarily comparable costs, depending on transmission systems and other infrastructure needs, etc.) The 1973-1984 Shoreham plant is not that original twin/quad plant. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.218.29.133 (talk) 01:43, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Greg Palast reports in August 2012 that his dealings with Shoreham whistleblowers in 1986 included seeing (and keeping copies of) inspectors' notes saying that there was no way a reactor with this design could ever withstand the stresses of an earthquake. One or more of the reactors at Fukushima had almost the exact same design as Shoreham. This observation would have been known to all the businesses and government agencies involved with Fukushima as well as Shoreham, presumably. The refusal to learn the lessons of Shoreham apparently lead directly to the Japanese disaster (which might have been far less deadly). Chelydra (talk) 14:14, 17 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Deadly" Japanese disaster ? Have you any sources about that deadliness ? --Robertiki (talk) 15:29, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The main article has to cover the history and component parts of Long Island's anti-nuclear movement, but this is impossible to do in any concise and accurate way. The paragraph or two that now tries to do this job is utterly misleading, implying a chronology that is off by ten or twenty years (saying that Nora Bredes brought together the Farm Bureau and the Lloyd Harbor Study Group is absurd, as the late, great Ms Bredes would be the first to acknowledge). But it's worth devoting some space on this Talk page to this aspect of the Shoreham story. Almost none of it could be documented to meet Wikipedia's standards, but perhaps someone will figure out how to bring the gist of the real story into the main article.

It would appear that this campaign was the longest, the hardest-fought, AND the most successful of the scores of local anti-nuclear efforts that sprang up around the world between the early 1970s and the early 1980s. The reasons why this particular movement succeeded when so many others fizzled out may be the most significant aspect of the story, with lessons that can be applied to grassroots campaigns on many other issues.

It would be impossible to name even 5% of the individuals who played a crucial "game-changing" role at various times in this protracted struggle. There was a disabled Vietnam vet who tirelessly read through the vast volumes of official data no one else had even glanced at, whose research showed the extent of the mismanagement and disorganization at the project. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of construction workers and clerical workers whose whistle-blowing was limited to letting family, friends, and neighbors know what was going on at Shoreham — their stories of haphazard construction, falsified documents, etc., probably did more than anything else to expand and motivate the vast numbers of people who got actively involved in the fight. There was a restaurant worker who organized the very first anti-Shoreham demonstration in June 1976, and laid the groundwork for everything that followed. Even before that demonstration, there was a talented satirist in the advertising department of the Mattituck Watchman whose relentless mockery of Lilco's pro-nuclear ads (promoting twin reactors at Jamesport, L.I.) helped set the brash, confident, and good-humored tone of the movement and inspired similar efforts from myself and others in the coming years. There was the right-wing editor-publisher of a shopper's-guide newspaper empire, whose conversion to the anti-Shoreham cause was a political bombshell. There were a couple of Maoist university professors whose few weeks of all-out involvement in the movement produced an innovative, audacious, anarchic network of do-it-yourself organizations in dozens of communities, each group free to develop its own personality and priorities. Many town council members and county legislators, as likely to be conservative Republicans as liberal Democrats, stuck their necks out to take a stand against Shoreham.

Three times I lost important arguments about the structure and strategy of the movement. When the question of whether to bother with any structure at all came up after the first demonstration in 1976, and again in the preparations for the big demonstration in 1979, I thought everything should be centralized and controlled by a core group. Nobody else wanted to bother with by-laws and such, and they didn't want me telling them what to do either. If they'd listened to me, the movement would have been stillborn. When citizens started lobbying the Suffolk Legislature to intervene more aggressively in the Shoreham federal hearings, in 1978-79, I thought this should simply serve to 'radicalize' people when they saw the futility of trying to 'work within the system'. But naive newcomers, notably Nora Bredes, had no idea what I was talking about, and didn't care -- they truly believed we lived in a genuine democracy and just wanted to make the system work the way it was supposed to work. These good citizens proceeded to do exactly that, and within a couple of years that same hopelessly corrupt Suffolk County Legislature had become the vanguard of the whole anti-Shoreham campaign, led by a partnership of Republicans and Democrats (eventually including Nora herself) who defied their party bosses to do the right thing. The folks at those 1970s meetings who refused to yield to the logical force of my arguments about structure and strategy should be counted among the many significant unsung heroes of the movement. It was their deeply skeptical, cheerfully anarchic, and relentlessly optimistic approach that kept the movement going and ultimately defeated the most powerful political and economic forces in the world. As we look in despair at deforestation, overfishing, climate change and economic injustice, it's worth remembering that grassroots victories against overwhelming odds are not unprecedented. Chelydra (talk) 15:41, 17 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all the global climate change! You did a super job in increasing coal usage! 47.18.34.63 (talk) 03:20, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This subject had a great deal of negative attitudes towards it in the early 1980s. Please don't allow that attitude to produce yet another unusable Wikipedia article like this one. The language and one-sided view of this article must be fixed. --KJRehberg 19:44, 1 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. — Omegatron 23:10, 13 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed again. Note some articles cited seem to be written by the nuclear industry. There must be other sources. — User:WayneH 05:28, 15 April 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.148.26.22 (talk) [reply]

Agreed. I found the tone of the article to be lamenting the loss of the plant. Small and only tangentially related notes like comparing the wind turbines to the plant's projected output. That the power is now done by fossil fuels. That LPA has high rates. Many of the citations are to editorials. --Schwern (talk) 01:40, 1 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto. Another gratuitous and dubious item was the claim (as if an established fact) that no one was hurt by the Three Mile Island accident; I added "some claim". In fact no one will ever know whether the resulting fatalities and other ailments were non-existent or numerous. What is a fact is that a loud, sudden, explosive release of steam from the plant in the dawn hours scared the daylights out of local farmers who were out in their fields when the accident began. I do not know how much radioactivity was in that steam, and I doubt if anyone does. All the official stats for radioactivity from the TMI accident come from Brookhaven Lab monitoring devices that were not put in place until many hours AFTER the (presumably radioactive) steam was released, and hence there is probably NO data that means anything at all, and no way of estimating likely health effects. The pooh-poohing of Long Island's need for an evacuation plan - the issue that decided the fate of Shoreham - on the basis of the pseudo-fact that "no one was hurt" at TMI, implies that opponents of the plant were frivolous or delusional. (Well okay, maybe we were somewhat frivolous and delusional, but we won because we told exhaustively-researched truths and we exposed outrageous lies.) Chelydra (talk) 22:51, 31 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Grimston and Fagin articles have several identical passages, and many other similarities. Of course Newsday doesn't give a date, so I'm not sure when that article was written. This would seem to suggest a date before October 2004 for the Newsday article. Regardless of who copied whom, we can't copy either. — Omegatron 03:35, 30 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, what a waste of money this plant was. Chalk another victory up for the "environmentalists" who seem hell bent on forcing us to derive all of our power from coal. These same idiots are now the ones probably complaining about global warming...130.71.96.19 19:33, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wow indeed. So, if the New York Mafia (including the Vario gang, the same folks you saw in Goodfellas) were in charge of a nuclear power plant construction site in your neighborhood, I guess you think only lily-livered "idiots" would have any doubts about turning it on? I do mean IN CHARGE - the grapevine buzzed with endless tales from the site, and all of them were true, with the possible exception of the suffocation of a whistleblower in cement (a story I heard from a local cop who says he saw it happen when he worked there, but I'm not sure he did). John Cody, boss of Teamsters Local 282, [See Paul Castellano's Rackets] was in charge of approving cement for use in and around Shoreham's reactor core; an anonymous witness says he approved a batch for use in foundations under the reactor core that had just been rejected by the county highway department - it was too weak or unreliable to use in curbs and sidewalks. (Why was the witness anonymous? Maybe Cody doing time for conspiracy to murder was the reason.) An experienced technician who didn't want to be blacklisted asked his girlfriend to tell the NRC about glaring construction flaws he meticulously documented, such as crucial dials indicating steam pressure installed upside down. The NRC sent its Enforcement Division to meet the girlfriend, but then they refused to even look at his documented information and diagrams so they could inspect it all themselves. They just wanted the guy's name — most likely so they could help get him blacklisted as a traitor to the nuclear industry. (I was in the meeting with the guy's girlfriend and another friend. I am not exaggerating or distorting this.) I could pass on dozens more stories just as loony as these --- and just about anyone who lived on Long Island during the plant's construction has their own stories along the same lines. It was often said by Shoreham workers that it was "the worst-built reactor in country" — e.g., "My dad works there and he says we're gonna make sure to be in another state before they turn that thing on!" Most of the costly materials and supplies that went in through the gate during the day went out over the fence the next night into the black market. The Shoreham construction site was known as by far the biggest and wildest marketplace for drugs on Long Island. As for the big picture you mentioned - in 1979 I started seriously researching the whole energy industry and all its environmental consequences (global warming included); it became clear to me that nuclear was only about twice as bad as coal, and solar was maybe a half as bad as coal, by the time you factor in all the hidden effects. That's why we advocated just eliminating wasted energy -for instance we had an engineer who volunteered with our group doing free energy inspections for businesses and institutions; he said the dust in refrigerator vents absorbs about 10% as much energy as produced by all nukes, or maybe it was 20%. Chelydra (talk) 23:23, 31 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• http://www.lipower.org/newscenter/pr/2005/012505_shoreham.html - installed two wind power plants Jan 2005
  • http://www.lipower.org/newscenter/pr/2004/sept29.wind.html
  • http://www.lipower.org/newscenter/photos/2005/jan25.shoreham.html
  • "as much as" 100 kW (1/8000th the amount that would have been generated by the nuclear plant)
• http://www.lipower.org/custserv/faq/faq.shoreham.html - FAQ - Shoreham Property Tax Settlement
  • http://www.lipower.org/newscenter/pr/2000/jan13_1_00.htm — Omegatron 05:00, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the links. I posted the wind turbines and am working on digesting the surcharge links. Americasroof (talk) 03:07, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Two 50 kW wind power plants = 100 kW total peak. If run at maximum power constantly (which never happens), this would be 876,000 kilowatt-hours per year. The article says up to 200,000 kWh per year, so the capacity factor is expected to be around 23%. Assuming a conservative 60% capacity factor for the nuclear plant, (chart of Millstone 1 here) this means the actual energy output by the wind turbines is less than 1/20,000th. [1] — Omegatron 01:05, 25 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As noted in the intro, the Shoreham plant is not the "twin" of the Millstone plant. A comparison of the Shoreham plant should be to the later generation GE BWr's, which should have higher capacity factors; or even to the more recent, still-operating, Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim "quad stations" capacity factors. As with the industry as a whole, capacity factors are being maintained close to 90%. Presumably the "more modern" Shoreham plant, starting up in '85 would have achieved equivalent capacity factors (and my have had an uprate to increase its total capacity - VY's recent capacity uprate was 20%, more than 100 MWe, at a nominal cost. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.218.29.133 (talk) 01:53, 27 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A constant attempt is being made to say the reactor was in Wading River. Here's this about that. The reactor was totally within the town of Brookhaven. Wading River immediately across the Wading River (actually an estuary) from the reactor is in Riverhead town. Shoreham and Wading River are in the same school district. Neither community is incorporated and so its boundaries are not "legal" but rather the way census best guesses the area. All articles about the reactor refer to Shoreham and not Wading River. This is a very important distinction because the reactor was officially Brookhaven's problem and not Riverhead's. Americasroof (talk) 03:07, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A

I remember that CBS's 60 Minutes did a report on Shoreham back in the mid-1980's. I'm not sure what would qualify as a source for this, since no transcripts or videos seem to be available of that report. ----DanTD (talk) 17:27, 13 September 2010 (UTC) The 60 Minutes report was probably the earliest and most important exposé of the widespread presence and influence of organized crime at the construction site. There's a long, hair-raising chapter in Karl Grossman's book about Shoreham (America's Chernobyl, Grove Press, I'll try to insert correct full title later) that covers this territory and adds much more to the 60 Minutes report. The TV show was definitely one of the major turning points in the Shoreham saga.Chelydra (talk) 13:57, 17 August 2012 (UTC) The exhaustive footnotes in Grossman's book include many citations of the 60 Minutes report, and if there is no transcript available, these should at least give a good indication of the report's main points. Chelydra (talk) 14:25, 17 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]