We Americans, whether as individual consumers, small-business owners, or CEOs of large corporations, are locked in a free market system that rewards the exploitation of a wide swath of open-access resources, to their detriment and our own. Think, for example, of the unrestrained overfishing of our Cape’s namesake Atlantic cod, now considered “vulnerable to extinction,” according to the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Oceana.
When it comes to the exploitation of such resources, America’s growth-oriented free market has many blind spots. For decades, we have heedlessly participated in the unfettered release into our atmosphere of carbon dioxide emissions, which, causing the warming of our planet, have led to deteriorating air quality and a variety of extreme weather events — floods, drought, and wildfires — all of which bedevil us daily.
We have also indiscriminately used the land around us as a dumping ground for our waste products and in doing so have introduced a variety of toxic pollutants and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also referred to as “forever chemicals,” that have been discovered in our water, air, fish, soil, food products, and our own bloodstreams. Several studies indicate that exposure to PFAS in the environment may compromise our immune system and be linked to health problems, including high cholesterol, low birth weight, and changes in liver enzymes. Testing is in its infancy. We should be prepared for bad news.
And now, very close to home, we on the Cape are engaged in a battle with Holtec Decommissioning International, the corporation responsible for dismantling the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. Holtec is proposing to release 1.1 million gallons of low-level radioactive spent fuel pool water into Cape Cod Bay. As Christine Legere has reported for the Independent, five radioactive isotopes have been detected in samples of the water as well as 22 nonradiological pollutants. More advanced testing is likely to discover others.
The indiscriminate discharge of radioactive water is a resolution with too many variables and unknowns: the exact manner in which water circulates in the bay, the unpredictable accumulation over time of harmful contaminants in animal bodies, including our own, and the degree of degradation in a diverse and productive marine resource. What goes around comes around. DDT has been discovered in the bodies of Antarctic penguins. The only people who think releasing contaminated water into the bay is a good idea are those who stand to profit from employing the easiest and least expensive waste removal solution available.
The wildfires in Canada, a direct result of climate change precipitated by the world’s (not simply Canada’s) high level of CO2 emissions, remind us that the air we breathe, though we don’t generally think of it as such, is another open-access resource. We can’t see the contaminants that Holtec is prepared to release in Cape Cod Bay, but they are just as real and potentially far more harmful than the particulate-laden smoke that blanketed the Northeast recently.
To be sure, as with many other modern-day issues, we are all complicit in the pollution of our environment. Our cars, furnaces, electric lights — in short, our way of life — are problematic. And if we are honest, we will acknowledge that the Plymouth nuclear station provided electricity that those of us who consumed it enjoyed without much forethought.
But guilty as charged, we also recognize that we need to make changes and are endeavoring to confront our environmental challenges head-on. One thing is indisputable: Holtec cannot claim any rights concerning Cape Cod Bay. Preserving resources accessible to all demands common sense. Treat the water and store it on site? I assume that would lessen the value of the real estate. Pay to ship it away? That would be expensive. Holtec, a corporation understandably interested in making a profit, wants to be unfettered. It is imperative that we keep it on a leash.
There was a saying among my Canadian neighbors when I lived in the remote regions of rural New Brunswick where many of us had open, beautifully crafted, rocked-lined dug wells: no sensible man spits in his own well.
Andrew Hay lives in Eastham.
