Thank you so much for supporting our petition! I really appreciate having you onboard with this cause, and today I wanted to share some important updates about my strategy moving forward.
You may have noticed that a few days ago the Cape Cod Times featured a story about our petition. At that time the petition had 15K signatures. After the story came out the signatures began to increase quickly and we soon hit 25K.
There are now more than 90K signatures. I am hopeful that this will prove to be the tipping point, and that Holtec's CEO Krishna P. Singh will publicly announce that he will transport the water to a facility for disposal, instead of releasing the water into Cape Cod Bay.
With regards to the Cape Cod Times article, I very much appreciate it. However, the title of the article “Holtec Fight Gathers Steam” concerned me…
“Fight” is not a word I keep in my vocabulary - unless I’m fighting a fish. Fighting has never been a part of my life, and I aim to keep it that way. The way I see things, we are all in this together.
Mother Theresa, a woman I have admired all my life, offers us a wonderful example - “I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.”
Moving forward, my petition efforts will mirror this tone, and it is for this reason I felt a change in strategy was necessary. In order to more effectively manage our campaign for success, I have chosen to make the following edits to our petition.
1) I have updated the title of our petition to “Holtec, Please Show Good Will to Cape Cod, Plymouth & the Surrounding Communities”.
2) Moving forward I will be using the word “radioactive” only when absolutely necessary, because I feel that word produces unnecessary anxiety and an overreaction in some people, which are things we could use a lot less of in this world.
3) I have added a statement from Holtec to the top of the petition, because it’s always important to hear both sides. “Holtec officials have said the water, even in its untreated state, is of equal or better quality than Plymouth’s drinking water”.
I do not believe that releasing this water into the bay will cause an environmental disaster. All my life I have harvested clams and eaten fish from the area surrounding the power plant and I am healthy and still very much alive. In the event that this water is released, you can bet I will still be eating those same clams and fish.
What this petition is truly about, is getting a big corporation like Holtec to pay attention to the communities they serve. This is a petition about morality, about listening to communities that would prefer to play it safe, especially when viable alternatives are available.
For example, in 2021, during the decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, the NorthStar Nuclear Decommissioning Company shipped approximately two millions gallons of similar water to the US Ecology facility in Grand View Idaho for disposal. I feel Holtec could easily do the same with the water that’s currently sitting in Plymouth.
After all, the money Holtec is using to decommission the power plant in Plymouth is coming from a 1 billion dollar decommissioning fund that was paid into over the course of many years by ratepayers like my mom and dad - so I truly feel we have a legitimate say in this matter.
Thank you very much for reading this update, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Thank you!
Ryan
PS- If you disagree with any of the changes I have made to the verbiage of the petition, then you are free to remove your signature at anytime by following the instructions on this page https://help.change.org/s/article/Remove-signature-from-petition?language=en_US