Thanks for “With Healey Push, Nuclear Debate is Revived on Plymouth’s Shore,” [“Gazette, Dec. 30]. First, the 1982 referendum that Governor Maura Healey wants to unilaterally repeal, which passed by a landslide 67 percent, doesn’t ban nukes but it does require permanent safe waste storage, an end-of-life decommissioning plan, an emergency evacuation plan, and citizen approval. To undo the clear mandate of Massachusetts citizens is as much an attack on democracy and due process as Trump’s ICE goon squads.

Second, nuclear fission has been a scam all along. The plants are not just uneconomical and a diversion of resources from true clean energy, but a dangerous failed technology with 100-plus potentially catastrophic accidents (not just Three Mile Island) and two actual catastrophes (Chernobyl and Fukushima). Forty years later, the land around Chernobyl is still uninhabitable and unfarmable. Oh yeah, and we taxpayers will get pennies on the dollar if there’s an accident, thanks to a corporate giveaway called the Price-Anderson Act that caps damage claims and subsidizes nuclear insurance premiums. It is not carbon-free if you account for the whole fuel cycle. It takes decades to bring a plant online — and we don’t have time for that. As the article mentions, nukes are linked to higher cancer rates and have a serious radioactive waste problem. But the article doesn’t mention that those toxic radioactive wastes have to be isolated from the environment for more than 200,000 years — even though we humans have no artifacts more than about 25,000 years old and no language older than a few thousand years.

Third, the SMR (Small Modular Reactor) “solution” also is a scam. This is unproven technology that loses the economies of scale, increases the number of sites that could be attacked by storms or terrorists, and places anyone within 50 miles at severe risk.
Please tell your state senator and state representative to remove this poison pill from the energy legislation. It’s section 80 of Rep. Cusack’s bill (4174) and section 45 of Governor Healey’s 4144.

Shel Horowitz

Hadley