On Saturday, February 12, 2000 an airplane banner will fly over South Bend, Indiana, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and along the Lake Michigan Shoreline near St. Joseph, Michigan to protest the upcoming re-start of the Cook nuclear power plant.
The banner will read “Stop In the Name of Love, Before You Cook the Great Lakes.”
In September, 1997 the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut down the two Cook reactors due to dozens of safety violations. The plants have remained shut down ever since. The watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) had exposed the problems at Cook, thanks to tips from inside whistleblowers at other nuclear reactors with the same ice condenser emergency containment systems. UCS nuclear safety engineer David Lochbaum has testified that for numerous years, the inoperable safety systems at Cook could have led to the deaths and injuries of hundreds of persons living downwind, for the radioactivity from an accident would not have been contained.
In August, 1999 the first annual Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp sought to keep the Cook reactors shut down for good. Over 250 concerned citizens representing dozens of environmental, safe energy, and public interest groups from 8 Great Lakes States and Canada held a week-long educational encampment in southwest Michigan, culminating in a non-violent civil disobedience direct action at the Cook plant. 17 protestors were arrested on charges of trespassing. NIRS in Washington, CAC in South Bend, and Don’t Waste Michigan are members of the Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Campaign.
American Electric Power Company (AEP), based in Columbus, Ohio plans to re-load the core of the Cook Unit Two with nuclear fuel rods on March 5th, and then re-start the reactor on April 1st. AEP plans to re-start Unit One in September.
“If there had been an accident at Cook, we could have had our very own Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe right here in the Great Lakes region, ” said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste specialist at Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) in Washington, D.C. Kamps, a native and life-long resident of Kalamazoo, Michigan before joining NIRS a few months ago, has been a long-time critic of nuclear power and advocate for safe, renewable energy sources such as energy efficiency, wind and solar power. As director of the Chernobyl Children’s Project, Kamps hosted eight visually-impaired children from the Chernobyl region of the former Soviet Union last summer.
“AEP considered simply closing down their highly troubled reactors after they were caught endangering our region from 1988 to 1997. But they’ve decided to re-start Cook, at huge cost to ratepayers of many hundreds of millions of dollars. For that foolish decision, April Fool’s Day is a very apt date upon which to re-start the Cook nuclear plant,” said Kamps.
“Once Cook re-starts, it will once again be releasing harmful radioactive gases into the air we breath and into the waters of Lake Michigan,” said Kamps. “Cook will also generate forever deadly high-level radioactive wastes, which AEP wants to dump on Native American lands out West, namely the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians near Salt Lake City, Utah. And of course, we again risk suffering a nuclear accident.”
Plans are already under way for the second annual Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp to take place this August. For more information, contact Kevin Kamps at NIRS in Washington at 301-270-6477 or Roger Voelker with Citizens Action Coalition in South Bend, Indiana at (219) 232-7905.