Solar Roller Blog!
| August 14, 2007 8:00 pm | to | September 1, 2007 8:00 pm |
Look for the solar rollers blog to begin on August 15th! 
Aug 13, 2007
The Solar Rollers are leaving tomorrow for a two and a half week tour of Vermont, stopping in every corner and every county of the state to bring the message: It’s time to close the dangerous, aging nuclear power plant in Vernon and make way for a ‘Decade of Change’ to a truly Green, renewable safe energy future. It’s time to put Vermont energy dollars to work for the local economy, instead of the Louisiana boardroom of Entergy.
There are excellent leaflets prepared, with the names and phone numbers and addresses of all the Vermont state legislators. We’ll be handing them out along the route, urging people to call or write their reps and ask that they hold hearings on Vermont Yankee, high level nuclear waste storage on the Connecticut River, and a renewable energy future. Most of all , we will be asking them to Say No to a 20-year license extension for the Vermont Yankee Nuke.
The Vermont legislature has decided to vote on whether to allow VY to operate for 20 more years. Without a certificate of public good, the plant must shut down by 2012. Vermont is the only state in the country that has taken back the power to accept or reject a nuclear plant’s operating license. Our future in Western Mass is hanging in the balance.
The Solar Rollers are an anti-nuclear bicycle group formed during the occupation of the Seabrook Nuke in 1978. Since then, 60 of us have ridden to Rocky Flats, Colorado, canvassing along the way for peace and safe energy, and toured Vermont in 1981 in support of a shutdown of VY and a nuclear weapons freeze. Twenty-six years later, a few of us are hitting the pavement again, for pretty much the same cause: for the link between nuclear power and weapons has never been clearer than it is today.
For the planet to survive, we must end the threat of nuclear destruction, and shut down the Vernon nuke. If this 34-year old boiling water reactor (BWR) is retired, dozens more US reactors with the same unsafe design could follow, shutting down like dominoes. BWRs like VY are inherently unsafe because they store reactor fuel on upper stories, in non-hardened areas. At Vernon, the reactor has more than one million pounds of lethally carcinogenic high level waste in a storage pool on the seventh floor.
Other states have seen reactors shut by citizen activity. With Maine Yankee, Rowe, and Connecicut Yankee all permanently retired, a shut down of Vernon could create a nuclear-free zone in the Upper Connecticut River Valley, important for life on all levels to flourish in our region.
The Solar Rollers have always been about outreach, and as supportive legislators from Windham County have told us, outreach right now is the key to the campaign to shut down Vermont Yankee. Multiply our efforts by riding with us for a day, or for the whole 2 1/2 weeks tour. Call us on the road at 413-775-3973 and we will send you our ininerary. Or email us and find out how to start a Solar Roller group in your community, and we will send you copies of our flyer to distribute there.
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