nuclear-news

WSJ MarketWatch: Cancer was “bound to happen” to animal grazing 5 miles downwind of Connecticut nuclear power plant

Published: August 27th, 2012 at 6:48 pm ET 
By ENENews 

Title: Commentary: The charmed life of Katie, the radioactive goat
Source:  MarketWatch (Wall St. Journal)
Author: Al Lewis
Date: Aug 15, 2012

Katie the goat died Sunday.

Inoperable cancer. It was bound to happen eventually, grazing the way she did, downwind from a nuclear power plant.

[…]

She was found as a stray wandering down a rural road [and] ended up as a pet on a sloping meadow in Waterford, Conn. And there, she ate the sweet grasses growing five miles north of the Millstone Nuclear Power Station.

Lab techs would come by and test Katie’s milk. In a 2001 report, Dominion Resources Inc. (US:D), owner of the Millstone plant, acknowledged Katie’s milk contained radioactive isotope strontium-90, among other frightening carcinogens.

[…] the plant, which generates about half of Connecticut’s electricity, denied it was the cause of this toxicity. Apparently the radiation in Katie’s milk must have come from somewhere else.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection also concluded Dominion wasn’t to blame. The agency’s then-director, Regina McCarthy, eventually went on to become assistant administrator for air and radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama. So breathe that.

[…]

Burton, founder of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, has been trying to shut down the plant for years. Nuclear power, she contends, is simply too expensive and too dangerous. And the radiation it produces ends up in milk, even human mother’s milk, said Burton who is also co-director of a group called the Mother’s Milk Project.

Burton is a bit of a firebrand who was disbarred as an attorney in 2001. A judge apparently took issue with her fierce critiques of state’s judiciary, calling them an “assault” on the court’s integrity. This didn’t stop her from running, unsuccessfully, for Connecticut attorney general on the Green Party ticket in 2006 or for filing lawsuits against Dominion attempting to shutter its plant.

After discovering the nugget of disclosure in Dominion’s report about strontium-90, Burton tracked down Katie the goat and eventually adopted her. She would take the goat to anti-nuke rallies across Connecticut, even appearing beside renowned consumer activist Ralph Nader. Katie the goat sometimes sported a sign that read “Got Strontium?”

[…]

August 28, 2012 - Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized