Echoes of Shoreham in 1979

Jenna Kern-Rugile lives in East Northport.

The unfolding disaster at Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant brought back memories for many Long Islanders of a battle we waged -- and eventually won -- some 30 years ago.

The seeds of the conflict were planted in 1965, when the Long Island Lighting Co. first announced plans to build a nuclear plant at Shoreham. LILCO called nuclear power cheap, safe and reliable, and the process of getting the project off the ground, though lengthy, went relatively smoothly. Construction began in 1973, to little opposition.

There was, of course, a contingent of activists that sounded an alarm -- especially about the dangers of locating the plant 60 miles outside one of the world's most populated cities, on an island that could barely manage the traffic during a normal rush hour. But the majority of Long Islanders took little notice. Even as huge increases in the budget mounted, the road to approval seemed likely.

That all changed on March 28, 1979, when the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., experienced a partial core meltdown.

That year, I was a senior at North Shore High School in Glen Head, part of a generation not known for its activism. I didn't know much about the Shoreham plant (or even where Shoreham was) until I was jolted into action by Three Mile Island.

We became glued to the television, just as many of us have been lately with coverage from Japan. During the weeks after the 1979 accident, I -- along with many Americans -- went to see "The China Syndrome," a movie released 12 days before Three Mile Island. I'll never forget the gasp when one of the characters says that if an explosion had occurred at the movie's fictional Ventana nuclear facility, it could have "rendered an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable."

Long Islanders woke up. While an anti-Shoreham demonstration in August 1978 had ended with 40 arrests among the small band of protesters, on June 3, 1979, 571 people were arrested as more than 15,000 gathered to call for a halt to the Shoreham plant -- though it was near completion, and a billion dollars had already been spent. Standing in the rain, we demanded to be heard in what was the largest demonstration ever on Long Island. Shoreham no longer felt so far away from my home in Sea Cliff.

In the minds of many Americans, Three Mile Island forever changed the notion that nuclear power is safe. The possibility of an accident was transformed from movie fiction to real life. And the idea that we might need to evacuate Long Island went from being viewed as the ranting of environmental extremists to a real possibility -- and an impossible one to imagine. Anyone who'd ever been stuck on the LIE -- and who hadn't? -- knew we could never get millions off our island quickly.

In light of the catastrophe in Japan, President Barack Obama said last week that we must "make sure that we are doing everything we can to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the nuclear facilities that we have." But he didn't reverse his commitment to nuclear plant construction, for which he'd budgeted $36 billion in new loan guarantees. Imagine if instead that backing were added to resources available for renewable energy -- technologies that could also wean us from foreign oil, create jobs and cut down on dangerous greenhouse gases.

The president acknowledges that nuclear energy is "not completely fail-safe," yet he maintains his support of this dangerous technology. Those of us who won the fight to keep nuclear power out of our backyards on Long Island shouldn't want anyone to live under the threat that these plants pose. Let's put our energy dollars, and our creative energies, into the continued development of solar, wind and other truly clean power sources.