OAK HARBOR, Ohio — Ninety minutes before a meeting was to start to discuss cracks found at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, anti-nuclear protesters Thursday staged a brief skit that reiterated their misgivings about the plant’s resumed operation.
Kevin Kamps, a leader of Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear, said the skit featuring the Homer Simpson and Mr. Burns cartoon characters, King Kong, and the Besse plant as a cracking egg was “absurd, zany street theater to blow off a little steam before we head off to a very serious meeting.”
They also mocked Thursday night’s 6:30 p.m. meeting — at which some 250 people have arrived for — as a dog-and-pony show.
Characters in the skit, which was conducted with the power plant as a backdrop, pretended to repair the building’s cracks with “nuclear-grade duct tape” and “nuclear-grade Gorilla Glue” while three-eyed fish danced nearby.
“The tritium leaks into the lake are beneficial to certain species,” Mr. Kamps, as Mr. Burns, intoned.
“They don’t even know the root cause. How can they say that it’s safe at this point?” said Mr. Kamps, who played the malevolent owner of a nuclear power plant on The Simpsons cartoons series.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission scheduled the Thursday night meeting to discuss inspections of the cracks found in a concrete structure at Davis-Besse and its reasons for letting the plant restart in early December.
The meeting is to run through 9:30 p.m. Thursday at the Camp Perry Clubhouse, 1000 Lawrence Rd., Bldg. 600, Port Clinton. The NRC had postponed a Dec. 15 meeting, citing a scheduling conflict.
A contractor cutting an access opening to install a replacement reactor head found a 30-foot hairline crack Oct. 10. It was in the 2 1/2-foot-thick reinforced-concrete building that surrounds a 1½-inch-thick steel containment vessel that encloses the reactor.
After a nine-week shutdown, FirstEnergy Corp. was allowed to restart the plant, citing its study that determined the cracks didn’t pose a threat. NRC officials said they also did checks and will present their findings. The plant near Oak Harbor is along Lake Erie, 30 miles east of Toledo.
First Published January 5, 2012, 11:52 p.m.
