Audience members fired off about an hour of questions at guest speakers from Dunkirk Mayor Kate Wdowiasz’s public meeting last week about a possible nuclear plant in the city.

Someone asked about the wastewater resulting from water-cooled reactors. “How many years was the coal plant here? That’s exactly what the coal plant did, took water out of the lake as coolant and pushed it back into the lake,” replied Andrew Whitaker, a University at Buffalo professor with extensive experience in the nuclear power field.

Whitaker said the temperature and condition of water returned to Lake Ontario at the nuclear plant in Oswego is “highly regulated … it’s a controlled process.”

An audience member worried, “Now that the coal plant’s been closed so long, we’re seeing improvements (in the lake’s ecological condition). So now we’re going to put something back in that could take us back where we just recovered from.” Whitaker emphasized federal rules regulating water temperature change from nuclear reactor wastewater.

A short time later, there were concerns expressed about radiation emitted by nuclear plants. Whitaker replied, “There are requirements that have been in place for a long time that keep radiation dose… below a threshold level. You get a much greater dose just getting in a plane and traveling from Buffalo to New York City.”

A man in the crowd worried about waste from nuclear fuel getting into groundwater. “I think you’re worrying when you don’t need to,” Whitaker said. “The flasks that store nuclear fuel… they take these flasks and they drop them 20 meters onto reinforced concrete blocks. They drive trains into them, I’ve seen a jet fighter flown into them, just to demonstrate that they are productive.”

In response to a question about nuclear plants and cancer rates, Whitaker said, “Cancer rates are lower. Why? The tax base goes up, health care improves,” and studies prove that.

“The point here is there’s no downturn in health,” he continued. The communities currently hosting large water reactors have come to appreciate it, “because they see the value in their community of that generational asset.”

Someone else wanted to know the economic impact of a nuclear plant. “This city’s been dying for years, the population is down,” the man said, soon adding, “I think that with the current state of the city and the debt that we’re in, we should consider this.”

Dennis Elsenbeck, an energy consultant who was the evening’s other guest speaker, replied.

“That has to be part of the assessment — what value does this bring to jobs, the taxpayers, and what revenues are brought in,” he said. “I was with Niagara Mohawk and National Grid for 30 years — the plant pays a lot into the local taxes, which reduces the tax burden across the residents.”

He added, “That’s the type of questions you want to make sure you’re bringing out, because it’s got to be an economic impact study as much as anything else.”

Whitaker later responded to a question about a time frame for a possible nuclear project in Dunkirk. He said building a gigawatt-scale reactor from scratch would take five or six years. “The big challenge is not so much the construction, it’s getting the humans in place to make it happen. You need 8,000 people.”

The Bills stadium project tested the limits of Western New York construction manpower — and a nuclear plant project could demand four to five times as many workers, Whitaker added.

Elsenbeck commented later on, “You gotta look at it from the point of view that you could be a host community, and a host community has leverage.”

A man who said he went to SUNY Oswego stated that there were never any problems with radiation during his four years there. “When that nuclear plant went up, everything went up in that community,” he said.

“Personally, from the younger generation, many of us want to see this happen,” he continued. “My family’s been here for several generations, and they were a steel family, a military family. To see what the city has done over the years to depress the area, it’s deplorable. We finally have a chance at something huge here, folks. I hope that you all look into that. I don’t want to leave Dunkirk, but if things keep going into the direction they are, what is here for the younger generation? Nothing. Personally, I’m all for this, guys. ”

Applause rang out after he finished.

The entirety of the discussion held in Dunkirk last week can be viewed on Dunkirk Access’ YouTube page; it constitutes the bulk of the Common Council July 15 meeting video.