An upcoming Harvard study will look for health problems in people exposed to airborne radiation near the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth.
Water evaporating from the plant contains radioactive particles, leading members of the community to worry about breathing the air.
“That really is the purpose of the study, to discover: Are there health effects, what those health effects are, and how best to mitigate them,” said Dr. Brita Lundberg, a physician and board member at Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, which is coordinating the project.
Nearby residents on the South Shore and Cape Cod have been fighting a plan by Pilgrim owner Holtec International to discharge radioactive water from the closed plant into Cape Cod Bay. As the dispute plays out, the water is evaporating into the outdoor air.
Though the water is treated, treatment does not remove all of the radioactive particles.
For the health study, researchers will place air monitors in several locations around the community, Lundberg said. Then, they will conduct a controlled study that compares people who live in the most highly affected areas with a control group — likely people who live farther from Pilgrim.
“They would be donating tissue samples, which could involve blood samples, urine samples, that kind of thing, where we can measure radioactivity. They might be completing a questionnaire,” she said.
Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility will convene an expert panel to inform the study and review the results. The panel’s review will be shared publicly.
“I think it's incredibly important, because a lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, you know, when you close down a nuclear reactor, a nuclear power plant, we're all done. You know, the show is done. Everyone can go home.’ And that isn't true,” she said.
Pilgrim’s nuclear reactor was shut down in 2019, and Holtec is decommissioning the facility. Spent nuclear fuel will be stored on the Plymouth property indefinitely in steel-reinforced concrete drums, called casks.
The evaporation of water is not coming from the casks, but from the reactor system, which once held more than 1 million gallons of water.
Lundberg’s organization received a $700,000 congressional earmark this month to coordinate the health research project, which is set to be done within a year. Radiation monitoring devices should be placed in the community soon, she said.
The group will work with a consortium of entities, including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston College, and the Massachusetts Medical Society.
An environmental sciences professor at Harvard, Petros Koutrakis, will oversee the health study.
Lundberg said local community groups, including Save the Bay, Cape Downwinders, and Pilgrim Watch, will help with the project.
