The police fired tear gas and arrested more than 5,000 passively resisting protestors Friday in an attempt to break up the largest antinuclear demonstration ever staged in the United States. More than 135,000 demonstrators confronted the police on the construction site of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant scheduled to provide power to most of southern New Hampshire. Organizers of the huge demonstration said that the protest was continuing despite the police actions. More demonstrators were arriving to keep up the pressure on state authorities to cancel the project. The demonstrator had charged that the project was unsafe in the densely populated area, would create thermal pollution in the bay, and had no acceptable means for disposing of its radioactive wasters. The demonstrations would go on until the jails and the courts were so overloaded that the state judicial system would collapse.
Governor Stanforth Thumper insisted that there would be no reconsideration of the power project and no delay in its construction set for completion in three years. "This project will begin on time and the people of this state will begin to receive its benefits on schedule. Those who break the law in misguided attempts to sabotage the project will be dealt with according to the law," he said. And the police called in reinforcements from all over the state to handle the disturbances.
The protests began before dawn Friday when several thousand demonstrators broke through the police lines around the cordoned-off construction site. They carried placards that read "No Nukes is Good Nukes," "Sunpower, Not Nuclear Power," and "Stop Private Profits from Public Peril. " They defied police order to move from the area. Tear gas canisters fired by the police failed to dislodge the protestors who had been prepared with their own gas masks or facecloths. Finally the gas-masked and helmeted police charged into the crowd to drag off the demonstrators one by one. The protestors did not resist the police, but refused to walk away under their own power. Those arrested would be charged with unlawful assembly, trespassing, and disturbing the peace.
What were the demonstrators protesting about