The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth will close in 2019, according to multiple sources.
They are citing low energy costs, market pressures and millions of dollars in necessary upgrades as the reasons for the closure.
The power plant was a source of both energy and concern for area residents ever since it was placed in the Manomet scrub coast. It helped keep the houses warm and the drinks cold for a few decades, and- Good Lord willing- we got it opened and closed without a Chernobyl-style disaster.
I took a tour of Pilgrm in 2008 or so, for an old article that I cant find in the archives. It looked very 1970s, with multiple dial labeled controls that made me think of the Batcave from the 1960s version of the Batman show. That's really what it looked like, sans Bat-mobile of course.
A few other things jumped out at me. The plant, while listed at 27 feet or so, seemed to be very, very close to sea level. They had two jetties and a jersey barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and a boiling water nuclear reactor.
The water flowing out of the plant, towards the ocean, was exactly the same color as Mountain Dew. I'm sure this has to do with sunlight and ionized water or something, and that nuclear power doesn't turn you green like the Incredible Hulk, but still...
The plant was also storing spent fuel on the site, hoping to send it to the Yucca Mountains in Nevada or somewhere like that. Amazingly, there aren't many takers when you're shopping Spent Nuclear Fuel storage.
The plant was also heavily, heavily guarded. I won't spill their details or anything, but you'd want to have a very good plan if you wanted to do some Bond Villain stuff. You'd be getting lit up before you even got exposed to the uranium or whatever they were using there.
The security force, which is 101% paramilitary, even wear their assault rifles while eating Chinese food. I kid you not. The guy I saw doing that immediately became my permanent visual definition of Badass Casual. You know he's gonna shoot you more than necessary if your terrorist attack makes him have to dump his General Tso's chicken on the ground and sling up Ol' Painless.
You can read about the shutdown here, or about the plant itself here... I'm not the expert. I'm more of the write-a-thought-provoking-article guy.
- Unless something bad happens quickly, we will never know if Pilgrim would have been able to stand up to a direct-hit monster hurricane. It had a nice bit of elevation, built on top of a sizable sand cliff. It also had Cape Cod blocking anything but a direct-hit storm.
Someone should put a marker about where the Fukushima line of reactor inundation would be, and maybe someday we'll see if the planners made a few crucial planning errors.
- If you wonder what the sudden loss of 14% of Massachusetts' power generation will do to your power bill, you'll find out in July of 2019. Remember, Cape Wind also got the Bozack from just about everyone, so we won't even have nascent wind technology to help things along.
- The plant's closure will cost the town 600 nice-paying jobs and $9.75 million a year in taxes. It also means we will need to import an additional 10 million barrels of oil and run our coal-fired power plant in Sagamore much harder.
- I'm already seeing a lot of "News Flash: Plymouth Economy To Collapse In 2019" things on Facebook. I'm seeing sympathy for the plant workers, too.
- I wonder what the NO ESCAPE FROM THE CAPE people who we used to see on the Sagamore Bridge will do for fun now.
- The closure of the plant means that Monster Hurricane becomes the only way we'll see a massive evacuation of Cape Cod, short of an Atlantic tsunami or the sudden arrival of Godzilla. We were looking at a Road To Basra type scenario of people cooking in their cars with a nuclear accident causing Cape Cod to empty.
- I planned to evacuate by boat, with the fact that I don't own a boat just being a minor obstacle in my world view.
- I'll have to go into the archives, find my Cape Cod Disaster Scenarios article, and revise the list from the top down. Pilgrim had the top spot there, I forget what #2 was, it may have been "series of shark attacks destroys tourist economy" or "asteroid strike" or "Sea AIDS."
- No, I don't know how long it will take to dismantle it, or how long before the area is safe for farming or anything like that. The line starts on the right for the Grown On The Site Of The Former Nuclear Power Plant produce.
- Will the towns keep the nuclear air-raid sirens up, on the off-chance we get a tornado or an air raid or something? We could have town-wide versions of the Morning Announcements we all remember from high school. I'd like Duxbury to use theirs to constantly broadcast reggae instrumental beats.
- Much of the area around Pilgrim, and I mean like Manomet to Bournehurst, is wildly underdeveloped scrub forest. If they start filling that in, we may need to carve a piece off of southern Plymouth and make a new town, maybe merging it with mainland Bourne. We'll do a whole article on that once some of the more serious people straighten me out on it in the comments or on Facebook.
- Will there be reluctance to develop that land around the plant? Will we have a Forbidden Zone?
- Would developing the Forbidden Zone around Pilgrim generate enough property taxes and carpenter jobs to offset the tax hit and plant job loss?
- It'd be funny if the land where Pilgrim presently stands is developed, someone puts a corny seafood restaurant there, Al Qaeda fails to get a series of memos, and a sorely-mistaken terrorist crashes a SEMTEX-loaded Cessna into a Seafood Shanty-type clam shack. Hopefully, it happens off-season.
- Fearless fishermen knew that the fishing was always good off Pilgrim. The water temperature differential plays a role or something, I don't know. It's always an Act Of Luck whenever I catch a fish.
- This pretty much kills the Cape Cod setting for my Nuclear Mutant Shark movie script. I'm never gonna get that Oscar now...
