This video is a part of a series to help us understand environmental law and environmental and social justice.

Lenny Librizzi and Joel Kupferman, re-live some of their activism from that time period, the late 70’s and early 80’s, as they challenge the nuclear industry at Shoreham’s nuclear reactor in Long Island, New York.

SOME HISTORY:

The cost estimate in 1969 for construction of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station was $217 million and was expected to be completed in 1975.  The construction was completed in 1983 with a final construction cost of $6 billion. Most of the cost overages were passed along to ratepayers.

Even though the plant was completed it never produced a watt of electricity for sale.  The plant was low power tested at 5% of capacity.  This contaminated the plant with radioactivity forever.

The Shoreham Nuclear Power Station is the only nuclear power plant that was completed and never produced electricity commercially.

It was decommissioned in May 1995.

This shutdown was due to over 20 years of many types of citizen activism and is a model for future activists.  Since the citizen actions in the 1970’s and 80’s no new nuclear power plants have been ordered by US utilities.

Two major nuclear plant accidents at Chernobyl, Ukraine on April 26th, 1986 and at Fukushima, Japan on March 11th, 2011 left large areas of those countries uninhabitable.

Nuclear weapons and nuclear waste are an ongoing threat to our survival.