Apr 6 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Stephanie Vosk Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.

For Christmas, Mary Lampert asked her husband for a nuclear engineer.

For her birthday -- the Duxbury resident will turn 66 tomorrow -- Lampert is just looking for some peace and quiet.

Since moving to town in 1987, Lampert has been fighting for change at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in nearby Plymouth. She formed the citizen group Pilgrim Watch in 2004.

She has spent day after day, dollar after dollar, preparing to almost single-handedly take on Pilgrim's owners at a hearing before a panel of judges from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on Thursday.

Pilgrim Watch has about 70 members, but it's Lampert who has researched endlessly and taught herself how to battle a power giant. It's Lampert who has succeeded in a demand for a hearing, a stage only one other citizens group has reached in the relicensing of about 50 nuclear power plants across the country.

"I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a nuclear engineer, the group is unfunded," said Lampert, who has degrees in the field of sociology. The last chemistry class she attended was at the Beaver Country Day School in the ninth grade, she said.

With the nuclear engineer and hydrologist she hired in tow, Lampert will argue one reason why the plant -- about 15 miles from her house -- should not be relicensed for 20 years.

Her contention that the plant does not have an adequate plan to maintain buried tanks and pipes is the only one of many issues she raised that made it to the hearing stage.

"I have a right to live here in safety and know what's being emitted," Lampert said. "I have a right to feel secure."

Entergy Nuclear Operations, which owns the plant, will present its own experts to dispel Pilgrim Watch's argument, spokesman David Tarantino said. "The plant is saying that the plan for ensuring the integrity of underground pipes and tanks is working and they are in good condition and that we have adequate monitoring in place," he said.

Tarantino declined to speculate on the hearing's outcome or the possibility of an appeal by Entergy, but he said if the safety and licensing board makes reasonable recommendations, the plant would likely comply.

Pilgrim's license expires in 2012.

Last September, a watchdog group in New Jersey argued before the safety and licensing board that the drywell casing at the Oyster Creek Generating Station would not survive another 20-year license. A drywell casing is part of the containment system for a nuclear reactor. The board disagreed, but the case is still on appeal.

The New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, another citizen watchdog group, will get its hearing in July on the relicensing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.

Whether the watchdog groups are successful in their quest to block relicensing, the hearings draw out the relicensing process. Without hearings, decisions are handed down in about 22 months. With hearings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a 30-month timeline for relicensing decisions.

The Oyster Creek relicensing process has already gone beyond 30 months, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.

In most of the relicensing cases in recent years, the NRC did not get hearing requests, he said. In New Jersey, while the outcome of the Oyster Creek hearing is still up in the air, it nevertheless helped to spotlight the issue, Sheehan said.

No relicensing application has ever been denied.

"It's the way the process is designed to work," Sheehan said. "It's another opportunity for any individual group or governmental body that wants to raise issues to do that."