Massena going nuclear?
The big buzz around St. Lawrence County this weekend is Massena officials have broached the idea of attracting a nuclear plant to town.
At a press conference yesterday, town supervisor, Joe Gray, and village mayor, Jim Hidy, said they’ve been “kicking around” the idea for some time. Hidy said it could bring “a generational change” to a town hammered by closures, jobs cuts and attrition at the General Motors, Alcoa, and Reynolds plants over decades.
The pair said they’d set up an exploratory committee to start looking into details and soliciting opinion from local residents.
Let’s remember this: this is the basic area that’s tried to lure a major aquarium, a massive NASCAR racetrack, and a 20,000 cow feedlot-meets-ethanol plant. Oh, and did I mention the underground atomic supercollider?
Obviously, none of those happened.
Gray and Hidy acknowledged the process of attracting a nuclear plant would take at least a decade, if it happened at all. And they deserve credit for raising the proposal as a topic of public conversation at the very earliest stages.
It’s definitely created a buzz. Supporters are salivating about hundreds of jobs. Opponents (I’ve seen a flurry of e-mails on a local environmental activist listserv I monitor) are already kicking into high gear to fight the idea.
What would you think about having a nuclear reactor in your backyard? (Aside from getting to live out your “I’m Homer Simpson” fantasies…)
Tags: economy, energy, st. lawrence valley
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if people can wait 10+ years to go through the planning, engineering, permit and appeal process, I’m sure it will bring jobs. But what happens in the meantime?
Maybe Massena should stop thinking so big and promoting small business to create jobs six at a time instead of 600 at a time.
Why not?! If nothing else we’ll get to see the NIMBY clan come out in full force and it’ll give the Hassig boys something new to focus on.
I’m not ken on the way we do nuclear power in the US. I recall a series of conversations I had with a nuclear plant engineer back in the period just before Three Mile Island. He assured me that the technology was foolproof and 100% safe. “An accident can’t happen” he said. When I met him immediately after the TMI incident he said “What can I say. Everything I told you could not happen, DID!”
The problem as Chernobyl illustrates is that even one accident can be disastrous. We use the design we do because that is the one Admiral Rickover wanted for nuclear submarines and the one that development $$ were therefore funneled into but… There is a safer design called ‘pebble bed’ technology which is far less likely to cause a disaster. If they were to go with that I’d be more comfortable with the idea.
We can’t get behind wind turbines why would anyone think that we could ever get the support needed for a nuclear facility? Drop it now it won’t be worth the effort.
Just foolish talk. No nuclear power plants have been built in the US for a very long time because they can’t get financing.
If they wanted to talk about getting two new jobs in Massena it would be a good start. Then they could work on getting two more and so on. Why waste so much time on pipe dreams? Well, unless you’re growing the “tobacco” you’re putting in the pipe.
Absolutely. It’s clean energy and we don’t have to destroy the countryside with those insidious windmill things.
Next up hydraulic fracturing!
A couple of years ago the big O expanded by accepting a high security lockup for sexually violent predators which does employ a good number of people and is pretty secure in the budget picture. That is the growth industry not all of this energy bunk.
Joe Gray should move to Cleveland.
I’m for wind turbines. I’m for the North Country getting new Generation IV nukes they’re developing overseas. But that’s happening in Europe, which is full of socialists, so nobody here will want any part of that.
I think every town in the Adirondacks should have its own nuclear power plant so we could do away with Nation Grind (not a typo) and NYSEG.
Actually Pete, there was a mini nuclear system about the size of a large walk in cooler in a magazine I was reading a couple years back. It was supposed to be able to power a large apartment bldg using a power source about the size of a pea. Never heard anymore about it