The Kalamazoo Gazette has quoted Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps responding to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's downgrading of the Palisades nuclear power plant's safety status as one of the worst in the country. The call has gone out from grassroots Vermont Yankee watchdogs for the formation of an "Entergy Watch," to monitor reactor risks at the second biggest corporate nuclear power fleet across the U.S., which includes the following dozen atomic reactors at 10 different nuclear power plants: Arkansas Nuclear One, Units 1 and 2; Cooper Nuclear Station in Nebraska; FitzPatrick in upstate New York; Grand Gulf in Mississippi; Indian Point Units 2 and 3 near New York City; Palisades in Michigan; Pilgrim near Boston; Riverbend in Louisiana;Vermont Yankee; and Waterford in Louisiana. Of these, Cooper, FitzPatrick, Pilgrim, and Vermont Yankee are General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactors (GE BWR Mark Is), identical in design to Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 to 4, the focus of Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" shutdown campaign. 

As Beyond Nuclear spelled out in a recent backgrounder, GE BWR Mark I storage pools for high-level radioactive waste are especially vulernable to catastrophic radioactivity releases, whether due to natural disaster, accident or attack.

Although a catastrophic radioactivity release from a number of Entergy-owned and operated reactors could impact Canada downwind and downstream, FitzPatrick in upstate New York is especially risky in this regard. Located on the south shore of Lake Ontario, directly across from the province of Ontario, this reactor had claimed to have installed a "hardened vent" in order to compensate for its small, weak containment, but that claim was later proved to be untrue.