In a cold and steady rain, activists marched from Plymouth Town Hall to the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station on Saturday to protest the station owner’s proposed discharge of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay.
Local opponents of the dumping were joined by marchers from as far away as New York. They marked Friday’s 11th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster and called for an end to environmental destruction from nuclear waste.
Jennifer Schmitt of Sand Lake, New York, said she wanted to add her voice to the protest of Holtec’s proposed dumping.
“We walk every year for more awareness of what happened in Fukushima 11 years ago,” she said. “And we want to prevent any kind of environmental disaster again and provide information on what happens after you close the nuclear plant.”
Participants included members of a Japanese Buddhist religious order associated with the Grafton Peace Pagoda in New York, fishermen, students, and people from Indigenous communities.
Some 50 people attended the kickoff demonstration at Town Hall; about half that number made the full five-mile march to Pilgrim, heading southeast on Warren Avenue to Rocky Hill Road. Others drove to meet the march at the end.
A marcher named Owl, who traveled from the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Nation, at the border of New York and New Jersey, said contaminated water hurts everyone, no matter where they’re from.
“Fukushima is perhaps one of the worst manifestations of the pollution on the water,” he said. “But whether or not it's on the scale of Fukushima or not, it's something that harms the water and eventually affects all of us.”
The rain let up before the march reached the Pilgrim gate. Outside the gate, Loreto Ruiz of Northampton knelt by a large rock to pray and chant.
“For me, it is a prayer, but it is a prayer in action,” she said. “So it's a verb in action that allows us to look inward, as well as into the future and into the past, and bring it all together in a way that says, ‘I am here, I am life with you, and I want to solve this problem.’”
Cape Cod activist Diane Turco spoke to the group. She said nuclear waste is a tragedy, and solutions must come from the people, not from profit-motivated corporations.