Montague Reporter, April 15, 2021
By Anna Gyorgy
Last week’s MR Public Service Announcement described the Earth Day related Great River Walk. On April 24 we can see for ourselves, together, the section of the mighty Connecticut River most affected by the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station (NMPS).
The Walk takes place 2 days after Earth Day, on Saturday morning, April 24, 10:30-12:30. The route starts from Dorsey Rd. in Erving, near the base of the majestic French King Bridge, then leads directly 1.5 miles to the intake tunnels of the pumped storage project. And back again. Child friendly, bring masks, bikes, but please no pets.
On Easter Sunday my partner and I walked the walk, to check it out. It’s a beautiful stretch of river, very peaceful, with a good flat road and bike route running alongside.
On April 24th we’ll learn more about what we’re seeing – and aren’t.
For how the powerful pumps affect the river and aquatic life can’t be seen. The powerful suction occurs at night, with unlucky fish and more forced up the mountain to a reservoir, never to return.
The often dramatic reversal of river current at night that results from the extreme pumping action is likewise missed, by humans, at least.
After a year of pandemic, the idea of a ‘spaced out’ community walk along the river is in itself appealing, but there is a goal and hope for this event.
The goal is to inform ourselves about the Northfield Mt. pumped storage project, and learn about its owner’s, the Canadian FirstLight corporation, efforts to win an operating permit for 50 years into the future.
Along the route we will hear from energy and wildlife experts. And that’s important, for if the facility’s actions appear hidden, the results are certainly not.
As environmental journalist Karl Meyer recently reported: “NMPS’s massive suction kills everything it inhales. Federal studies on American shad show tens of millions of eggs and larvae extinguished annually, plus the deaths of over 2 million juvenile shad sucked in on migrations to the sea. Its unstudied impacts on 20 odd other resident and migrant species leave plenty more death to ponder.”
Why is this happening?
The rationale for this project may have appeared to make sense in a bygone era of nuclear expansion and lax environmental review. Here is some ‘background’ from a June 2020 report commissioned by FirstLight:
“In late 1964, Connecticut Light & Power, Hartford Electric Light Company, and Western Massachusetts Electric (all of which are legacy companies of Northeast Utilities and now Eversource), applied for construction of the Northfield project. A final license was issued in August 1968. Northfield became operational in 1972.
As with most pumped storage plants, Northfield includes an upper reservoir, intake channel, powerhouse, and tailrace tunnel, which links the pumped storage facility to the Connecticut River.
Northfield originally was expected to consume excess energy produced by a number of planned nuclear units during evening hours and generate electricity during peak hours when power was needed most. During the 1970s, construction of some of those nuclear units did not come to fruition.”
So what a good idea that seemed! As these grid-feeding colossi (twin 1500 MW nuclear reactors were proposed for the Montague Plains in late 1973) must be located near rivers, to supply the massive amounts of cooling water for the reactors — killing more fish and heating the rivers — why not use that ‘extra’ night-time power to pump river water up to a holding pond, to release through turbines later?
The fact that “construction of some of those nuclear units did not come to fruition” is of course thanks to a dedicated grassroots movement supported by a few scientists revealing the immense dangers involved. After years of government lies, these were hard for the general public to believe – until the 1979 nuclear meltdown at one of the Three Mile Island nukes near Harrisburg, PA. What you can’t see, can harm you.
The nuclear plant in Rowe was closed and nuclear plans in Montague canceled. Finally, in 2014, the dangerous Vermont Yankee plant succumbed to sustained citizen pressure – and its own history of leaks and accidents.
But one quite tragic ‘appendix’ to the nuclear story is the related pumped storage, now using other energy sources to provide its rationale for using more energy than it produces, at tremendous cost to fish and friends.
Back before fracked gas pipelines threatened, local residents in Western Mass. learned about and fought to stop the nukes. Me too. But I admit that I was not aware of the related aspect and dangers of the pumped storage project.
In this era of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and awareness of the need for environmental justice – for human and all living communities and beings – every energy source should be non-violent and fossil-free, produced and used as close to home as possible. And only after taking all possible actions to conserve and save energy, resources — and finally ourselves.
Anna was author-editor of the 1979 “Bible” of the anti-nuclear movement: NO NUKES, Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power, and active with the Clamshell Alliance in the late 1970s.