(Mary Lampert, director of Duxbury’s Pilgrim Watch, has found powerful support in her fight against Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant’s relicensure.)

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Gregory Jaczko cast the dissenting vote last week in a losing appeal made by Duxbury’s Pilgrim Watch that would have reopened the relicensing of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. Pilgrim Watch, headed by local nuclear safety activist Mary Lampert, appealed on the basis that the NRC has not considered the lessons learned from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and applied them to Pilgrim Station though they are the same design.

In his dissenting opinion, Jaczko, a longtime proponent of transparency in government and often a lone voice on the commission advocating for tighter security regulations for nuclear power plants, sided with Pilgrim Watch. In his statement, he wrote, “Given the significance of [the Fukushima] accident and the potential implications for the safety of our nuclear reactors, we should allow members of the public to obtain hearings on new contentions on emerging information if they satisfy our ordinary contention standards. Applying more stringent admissibility standards to Fukushima contentions because a Board has taken the administrative action of closing the record on an unrelated hearing will lead to inconsistent outcomes and, more importantly, unfairly limit public participation in these important safety matters.”

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