MONROE — Anti-nuclear activists marked the 50th anniversary of Fermi 1’s partial meltdown Wednesday with a peaceful rally at downtown Monroe’s Loranger Square Pavilion, during which they called for America to embrace more renewable energy and support efforts to safeguard the public from radiation exposure.
Area residents stopped by to pick up literature, listen to music, and chat. Three or four classes of journalism and English students from nearby Monroe Middle School, each with about 25 students, came by and used the event for a writing exercise, said rally organizer Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan.
Mr. Keegan said the commemoration was meant to inspire proactive discussions about future energy production, not just dwell on the near-catastrophic event that was reported to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office at precisely 3:09 p.m. Oct. 5, 1966.
Fermi 1, which is on the same site as DTE Energy’s operating Fermi 2 nuclear plant, was an experimental breeder reactor built during nuclear power’s fledgling era.
It operated from 1963 to 1966, when a blocked coolant line caused a partial fuel meltdown.
The event was America’s third nuclear accident, many of which the public knew little about until the much higher-profile half-core meltdown of Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Harrisburg, Pa., said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The striking thing to me is — 50 years later — there are still lessons unlearned,” Terry Lodge, Toledo Coalition for Safe Energy spokesman, said.
Mr. Keegan, Mr. Lochbaum, and Mr. Lodge were among seven speakers who addressed about two dozen people Wednesday at a news conference which began at the exact moment the meltdown was reported to authorities 50 years earlier.
Although eclipsed by Three Mile Island and more significant events in other parts of the world, such as the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown of 2011 in Japan and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 near Kiev, Russia, the Fermi 1 incident inspired the 1975 John G. Fuller book We Almost Lost Detroit, as well as a protest song by the late singer Gil Scott-Heron.
The plant, run by a consortium of more than 20 firms, was restarted in 1970 and shut down for good in 1972. It operated a quarter-mile from its successor, Fermi 2, which has been online and producing electricity since 1985.
In a statement issued through utility spokesman Guy Cerullo, DTE said Fermi 1 was “a demonstration project conceived and built by a consortium of companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s — the early days of nuclear energy development.
“The project contributed greatly to the understanding and further development of commercial nuclear energy going forward. Contrary to sensationalist accounts, we did NOT almost lose Detroit; about 1 percent of the fuel was damaged and the plant operated again afterward,” the statement read.
All of Fermi 1’s fuel was removed from the plant in 1975 and shipped to Idaho.
According to the NRC, no abnormal releases to the environment occurred. Plans call for dismantling the rest of that plant in about two decades.
Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
First Published October 6, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
