[NukeNet] FW: A Nuclear Warrior Retires

[Norm Cohen]

Coalition for Peace and Justice; UNPLUG Salem Campaign, 321 Barr Ave,
Linwood; NJ08221; 609-601-8583; Cell Phone - 609-335-8176

  _____  

From: NECNP [mailto:necnp at necnp.org] 
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 2:23 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: A Nuclear Warrior Retires

 

  

New England Coalition

        VT       .      NH       .       ME       .       MA       .
RI       .       CT        .         NY      -

POST OFFICE BOX 545,  BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT 05302

                                      on Nuclear Pollution

 

New England Coalition e-bulletin

 

The half-life of Raymond Shadis

 

A nuclear warrior retires

 

By Kathryn Casa

The Commons

 

Here is Ray Shadis, on Page 1 above the fold.

OK, so it took his "retirement" to get him here.

For more than three generations, Shadis has willingly gone head to head with
some of the top nuclear minds in the country, yet he is admittedly
confounded by the logic - or lack thereof, he would argue - of the press.

"For the first time in history, a nonprofit advocacy organization has
managed to get four contentions accepted in a licensing proceeding before
the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, yet we had no more than a single
line mentioned at the bottom of a story . It's more than a little annoying,"
conceded Shadis, who until last month worked as technical advisor to the New
England Coalition, a Brattleboro-based nuclear watchdog.

"Most editors and a lot of reporters would, in every way except spatially,
give the utility and the NRC the last word on things. . So the story would
be laced through with words like 'mildly radioactive' or 'less radioactive
than your average Macintosh Apple.' This has gotten so bad in Vermont over
time that no matter how extraordinary the efforts and accomplishments of the
New England Coalition, they do not get reported."

Shadis said there have been numerous articles in which the only source was
Entergy, "or in the case where there were two sources it was Entergy
Corporation and their handmaiden, the NRC."

If you don't know what "contentions" are, or who Entergy is, you probably
won't be reading much more of this story. So before I lose you, let me say
this: The story of Ray Shadis is the epic tale of David and Goliath, Ray
being the David who takes on a take-your-pick of nuclear giants: Maine
Yankee, Entergy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; the Vermont Public
Service Board.

With stuff like "Entergy Corporation and their handmaiden, the NRC," the
irony is that Shadis is a veritable quote machine, the kind of source
reporters love, but have been taught never, ever to use without a response
from the other side.

So you go to the other side and you get NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan saying,
"I'm not going to comment on his oratory skills," or Entergy spokesman Rob
Williams saying just plain "no comment" and other things that make readers'
eyes glaze over.

That's the thing with Shadis, who in his other life farms and creates metal
sculpture: He's a palette as rich as a New England autumn among the flat,
gunmetal grays of an industry of scientists, bureaucrats and nuclear Navy
alumni paid to keep their personal opinions sealed up tight.

Shadis grew up in New Jersey, the product of long line of stalwart
Lithuanians like the blacksmith great-grandfather who walked out of exile in
Siberia to Germany (picking up the family en route) where they took a boat
to the United States and, with no formal training, became highly skilled
clothing designers and tool-and-die makers.

"There is an ongoing and deep-seated interest in things material, physical
phenomena, that goes through my family to the way back, and this is just a
little extension of all that," Shadis said, by way of explanation as to how
he became a nuclear physicist in everything but name and degree. "I'm just
an avatar of where my family's been and what they've done."

Also, he said he didn't go into physics "because you have to do arithmetic."

"If you get trapped into playing the numbers game you can lose sight of the
operative principle. It also slows you down. A lot of this stuff you have to
grasp intuitively."

Instead, Shadis got a bachelor of fine arts from Fairmont State College in
West Virginia, the same place he met his wife, Pat. Pretty early on, the
couple decamped to Edgecomb, Maine, and wound up buying a farm Shadis
discovered in his search for old iron - a farm about a mile and a half
downwind from the local nuclear power plant. 

"We came to Maine in 1967 with the intention of starting an intentional
community . but it turned out I wasn't really good at living with people,"
Shadis said with his typical deadpan delivery. "I didn't like other people's
kids very much and it turned out I was really impossible to get along with."

So the Shadises had six kids of their own, and Shadis taught art in the
local school part-time and became president of the Catholic parish. But
then, on  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_28> March 28,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979> 1979, in Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island
Unit 2 had a partial core  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown>
meltdown and everything changed.

"I tried to call the regulators," Shadis said. "I tried to get a number for
the Atomic Energy Commission, not having realized it was no longer in
existence; it was now the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I got a hold
of a very pleasant NRC person down in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
they said every licensed nuclear power station has, somewhere in the near
environs, a public document room. So I went to the public document room for
Maine Yankee in Wiscasset at the local public library.

"At the time all of what they got in was in paper, and they had a stack of
paper there with a new list of documents that had just arrived that morning.
I started to go through them and found that sometime a few weeks prior,
Maine Yankee had had a spill of a couple of thousand gallons of radioactive
coolant in the containment. The vents were open at the time, but the
radiation monitors on the vents were not functioning, so they had a release
of radioactive iodine that was essentially unmeasured and unmonitored, but
no one was following these things at that time."

Shadis began to follow them. Closely. He and his wife formed an organization
and held meetings and protests, leading a petition drive and march on the
statehouse. Ultimately, three citizens' referendums failed to get enough
votes to shutter the plant, but Shadis and other activists kept the pressure
on, insisting on an independent safety inspection that revealed serious
problems. In 1997, Maine Yankee's owners decided it wasn't worth it to try
to fix the reactor and mothballed it.

By 2005, all but the nuclear waste was gone.

"I believe that when Maine Yankee closed down, he got the library
collection," said the NRC's Sheehan. "I think it's sitting in his garage.
That speaks to his dedication. Who else has a library of documents sitting
in storage in their garage?"

In tandem with his Maine activism, Shadis had been working with the
Brattleboro-based New England Coalition since the 1980s, and with the
demolition of Maine Yankee complete, he turned his full attention south.
Vermonters in 2001 were facing the sale of Vermont Yankee to Entergy,
followed in quick succession by a 20 percent power uprate, the storage of
nuclear waste in Vernon, bids by Entergy to increase the water temperature
of the Connecticut River and change the way radiation is measured, all in
the context of a 20-year license extension intended to keep the reactor
operational until 2032.

With Shadis' guidance and tutelage, the small clan of activists at NEC
became the first organization in the country to have their arguments
formally heard before a federal nuclear regulatory appeals panel. In
southern Vermont, where opposition to nuclear power runs deep and
ideological, Shadis was like Moses. When he stood to speak at crowded NRC
hearings, waves of relief would sweep the crowd, as if they knew it would be
OK; Ray was here.

Shadis turned 65 on Nov. 18, and that's where he drew the line, even though
the results of some of his finest work - the coalition's appeal - are still
pending. He still plans to work with the group on a contractual basis.

Asked what he considers his greatest achievement, Shadis is
uncharacteristically demure. "I don't know what to say about that. I don't
know what to say about that. I am not so much the achiever as the recipient
of great things, and undeserving all the way. The affection and the support
and camaraderie of really good people - you can't beat that. I would say I
have known giants. I have known people of great heart. And they have managed
to forgive me my many transgressions and have been good friends, and you
can't top that."

And his greatest frustration? Like his old nemesis, the atom, here is where
Shadis splits. "Hell, I don't know. It's just a bundle of frustrations isn't
it? My greatest frustration is a failure to be able to convince people of
their greatness, of their enfranchisement. Altogether too many people agree
to be victims because they don't feel they have the power or the authority
or the ability to challenge their oppressors or aggressors, whoever is
heaping insult and injury on them.

"The greatest frustration is a failure to be able to lift large numbers of
people out of their fear, to get them to stand up  . It's like trying to get
an invertebrate to walk - you stand it up against the wall and it just
slides down." 

On a recent day of long sirens and short speeches, Shadis officially
exchanged his nuclear shield and sword for a massage and spa weekend - a
thank-you gift from NEC, bestowed at the group's annual meeting.

At his retirement party, NEC board member Pamela Long said it was Shadis who
prompted her to get involved in the thankless VY fight. "I used to pick up
the paper every morning, I'd be depressed, I'd be miserable. I'd read
through an article and at the end there would be a quote from Ray Shadis,
and it would begin to make my day - some wonderfully witty, caustic remark .
That's why I became a trustee. You are our knight in shining armor, Ray,
you're on a white horse. I'm sure there's thousands of people who also read
those remarks and had hope. Thank you."

In point of fact, Shadis went back home to Maine and burned the midnight oil
for three nights to meet a federal filing deadline - exactly like his mother
used to do, ripping out seams by lamplight to perfect a garment.

He was still breathless the next afternoon when the phone caught him just as
he was rushing off to the post office, and he kindly asked me to call back
tomorrow, but not much later than 9 because it was expected to be warm and
clear on the coast, and there was work to do.

 

Kathryn Casa is interim managing editor of The Commons, a Windham County
newspaper in which this article first appeared.

 

 

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New England Coalition
PO Box 545
Brattleboro, VT 05302
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