Nuclear Danger Zone, NC

Jordan Lake, a 47,000-acre recreation site just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, is a picture postcard vision of Southern hospitality: Ringed with pine trees, it's a haven for water-skiers, fishermen and sunbathers, not to mention a source of drinking water for surrounding communities. But rising out of the greenery on the lake's southern horizon is, for many, a more ominous vision: the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant, its familiar silhouette topped by a plume of steam.

As early as July, if Carolina Power and Light (CP&L) and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission have their way, the plant could be on a trajectory to becoming the nation's largest high-level nuclear waste site. That's if the NRC approves an operating license amendment doubling the number of spent fuel pools in use from two to four. Each pool, forty feet deep and constructed of reinforced concrete six feet thick, would store the fiercely hot and lethally radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation at the Harris plant as well as at two others owned by CP&L.

The spent-fuel assemblies, unless put into "dry cask" storage (not currently an option at Harris) or kept in pools of deep, circulating water, will ignite if exposed to air. And that possibility is fueling fears of a worst-case scenario: a fire in all four pools that could release as much as 790 kilograms of radioactive cesium-137 into the environment (the disaster at Chernobyl released only twenty-seven kilograms). An act of terrorism, sabotage or simple water loss might trigger such an accident, which could kill tens of thousands of people and render an area the size of North Carolina uninhabitable--for centuries.

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