The Yankee Rowe nuclear plant in western Massachusetts permanently shut down in October 1991. In November 1999, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stopped maintaining the local public document rooms (LPDRs) it had established near the Yankee Rowe plant and other NRC-licensed nuclear facilities across the United States. The NRC transitioned to its electronic library on the Internet, the Agencywide Document Access and Management System (ADAMS).

With Yankee Rowe's decommissioning well under way and the NRC's records becoming more dated and less needed, the Greenfield Community College library looked for another steward of the LPDR information. The Greenfield Community College established two criteria for any potential new steward: (a) the collection had to remain intact and (b) the collection had to remain accessible to researchers.

Jonathan M. Block, an attorney based in Putney, VT, who has represented numerous organizations including Citizens Awareness Network, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Greenpeace, New England Coalition, Friends of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution, and UCS, worked with Carol Letson at the Greenfield Community College to arrange for UCS to obtain the collection and house it in our Washington, DC, office. UCS thanks Ms. Letson and Mr. Block for their efforts to keep this collection both intact and accessible.

UCS gladly makes the collection available to researchers by request. The collection contains NRC documents dated through November 1999 on microfiche. The NRC maintains an online bibliography of the records within the collection. Using Citrix-based access to ADAMS and then selecting the Public Legacy set of records (rather than the default Public Library set), researchers can see what's available in the collection.

Researchers seeking to access the collection should contact Teri Grimwood, program assistant to the UCS Global Security Program, or David Lochbaum, director of the UCS Nuclear Safety Project, in the Washington, DC, office at (202) 223-6133 or by email to tgrimwood@ucsusa.org or dlochbaum@ucsusa.org to schedule access to the collection.