Stacey Polk lives less than two miles away from Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant in Glen Rose. And even though the emergency siren for the plant is in her front yard, she isn’t concerned about it going off, even after the nuclear disaster in Japan.
“The community surrounding Comanche Peak is very supportive of nuclear energy,” Ashley Barrie, a spokesperson for Luminant, the parent company of Comanche Peak said. “They know the track record of success for the existing units and see the future possibilities with theproposed expansion.”
Despite the fact that Polk lives within walking distance of a nuclear power plant, she is among a minority of Americans who continue to support nuclear power after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan rendered its Fukushima Daiichi plant a major safety hazard.
In a poll conducted by Gallup in mid-March, only 44 percent of Americans said they were for nuclear power, down almost 20 percent from last year when Gallup asked the same question. In the same poll, almost 70 percent of Americans said they were more concerned about nuclear power than they were before the Japan disaster; 39 percent of those said they were “a lot more concerned.”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely something you have to worry about. But I don’t worry about it today any more than I did before,” Polk said from her front yard as her two children played with their dogs behind her.
But Karen Hadden, the executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition said that Polk and the rest of Glen Rose do have something toworry about.
“In this country we’ve just been lucky,” she said. “Unfortunately, it may be a matter of time before an accident happens here.”
Hadden cited inadequate fire retardant at Comanche Peak as an example of what local residents should be concerned with.
“In Glen Rose, there is no paid professional fire department locally,” she said, noting that no Texas nuclear plant has any nearby professional fire departments. “A fire at a nuclear plant is not the time you want a volunteer fire department.”
Polk said that the people who are concerned are simply misguided.
“People are afraid of what they don’t know,” she said. “[Comanche Peak] isn’t quite like the one they had in Japan, and I definitely did my research before I moved out here.”
Polk moved to Glen Rose two years ago when her husband’s employer asked him to relocate. She said she was concerned at first, but when she learned of Comanche Peak’s safety regulations, she moved without hesitation.
“We don’t live in a place where we are going to have major earthquakes or tsunamis, and if anyone was going to attack it, good luck,” she said.
Even if a tsunami did wash over Comanche Peak, its differences to Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant may prevent such a disaster.
One of the main problems at Fukushima Daiichi was that its backup diesel generating system was kept above ground and was destroyed in the tsunami, preventing the plant from keeping spent nuclear fuel cool. Comanche Peak’s backup system is stored underground. The Japanese plant also uses less advanced boiling water reactors, while Glen Rose’s plant uses pressurized water devices that come with built-in backups.
Another main problem for Japan was that Fukushima Daiichi stores its reactors, spent nuclear fuel and turbines in the same building. At Comanche Peak, the reactors are housed separately and the spent nuclear fuel is stored in another location.
Barrie said that these safety measures are carried out to ensure the safety of the plant’s workers and neighbors. She said because of this, neighbors like Polk continue to be supportive of the plant’s mission, even in light of the proposed expansion.
Luminant revealed plans to build two more units at the Glen Rose site last year. There is no announced date for beginning the construction, and the plant said it expected schedules to “fluctuate over the coming few years.”
A statement released by Luminant after the start of the Japanese nuclear disaster said that they would “work in close concert with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and industry groups to incorporate lessons learned from the events in Japan into the ongoing process of designing, licensing and building of our proposed units.”
But this assurance doesn’t quell Haden’s concerns. She said that the design for the two new units is completely new and hasn’t been built anywhere else in the world, so assurances mean little.
“It’s not new technology, but this particular design has never been built before, so this means to me that DFW becomes a guinea pig for testing out something new,” she said.
As far as national approval ratings of nuclear power go, the expansion has seen its share of disapproval. More than 30 contentions were filed in opposition to the expansion, but all were defeated in hearings with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB).
Polk said that the expansion doesn’t bother her a bit. She said it only bothers others because “Americans’ opinions change daily; especially out of fear.”
