Guest columnist Karl Meyer: Earth Day and a river license to kill Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project upper reservoir. Recorder file photo Published: 4/20/2021 1:34:51 PM Fifty-one years after the first Earth Day, the four-state Connecticut River remains prisoner to an ecosystem-crippling license the Federal Power Commission issued in Massachusetts for the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project in 1968. Finished in 1972 and built to run off the massive overproduction of electricity from the new Vermont Yankee nuclear plant — NMPS began sucking up huge, hourslong inhalations of the Connecticut’s flow. Everything pulled into its giant tunnels perished, from tiny fish eggs to 3-foot American eels. It would be decades before a hint of the scale of its annual carnage would be understood.