With an emboldened plutocracy flexing its muscles all over the country, it’s good to have another reminder  that our DC delegation continues to look out for the poor “step-children” who have been generally cut-adrift in the current round of economic blackmail. In this case, those “step-children” are the twin causes of environmental and human safety, both of which Entergy apologists would willingly  sacrifice on the altar of “cheap” energy, just to keep VY burbling away well past its sell-by date.

Our own “DC 3” have all signed onto a letter drafted by Bernie Sanders, who sits on the panel charged with oversight of the NRC, urging that regulatory body to ensure that clean-up of Vermont Yankee is undertaken immediately following closure of the plant.  

The lawmakers called it “unacceptable” that Entergy, which owns the Vermont plant, could engage in “decades of delay” before cleaning up the site along the Connecticut River at Vernon, Vt. “Immediate decommissioning will assure Vermonters that the plant is being disassembled safely,” the delegation wrote. An immediate cleanup and shutdown of the site also would allow the plant operator to take advantage of the skills of many long-term Yankee employees who otherwise would lose their jobs.

In the letter to Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, the delegation requests a meeting with the full commission; and that the meeting should include Governor Shumlin,

because of the “enormous consequences” for Vermont and the state’s “vital interest” in the plant’s safe shutdown.

Tying swift decommissioning to job retention is a brilliant and entirely legitimate strategy, which should steal some thunder from one of VY’s dwindling arguments against closure.

As we know all too well,

Entergy has indicated it favors a so-called “SAFSTOR” decommissioning method, a process that the delegation letter said “would let Entergy off the hook” for cleanup and waste disposal for years or even decades. “While Entergy may prefer leaving the plant to sit like an abandoned factory because it has not saved the necessary funds to fully decommission the plant, this is not the safest option for Vermonters,” Leahy, Sanders and Welch wrote.

Senator Sanders points out that a delayed decommissioning process could have grave consequences, as might have been the case when an idle Illinois reactor  experienced frozen pipes (a likely scenario in Vermont) which burst and released 55,000 gallons of radioactive water into a containment building.  An opportune discovery of the problem by the night watchman may have been all that prevented a much more extensive release.  

I spoke with, reactor expert Arnie Gundersen who told me

Had the watchman at Dresden 1 not discovered the leak that created a 55,000 gal. spill inside the containment, an unimaginably worse situation would have developed within 24-hours.  An even larger pipe had almost frozen solid.  Had that pipe broken, the entire fuel pool would have drained, leading to gamma radiation so intense that the entire site would have had to be evacuated, including the two other operating reactors.  

While Arnie doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that the NRC will heed the pleas of the Vermont delegation, he agrees that they are taking a brave and rational position with regard to decommissioning which deserves special recognition.

What the Vermont delegation is requesting of the NRC is hardly unprecedented.  In fact, the idea of delaying Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning is something quite out of the ordinary for a site having only a single reactor. The Maine and Connecticut Yankee plants, which were similar to VY, were both immediately decommissioned after shut-down.  

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick up the phone or send an e-mail off to Bernie and the others to say “we support you on this.”   Washington’s got to be a chilly place for these three about now, since even Obama would probably rather have VY up and running past 2012, if only for the statistical cover it would provide on energy.  We need to send a little home-grown warmth their way every now and then.  God knows, we holler loudly enough when they get it wrong!

Bernie Sanders (802) 862-0697  

Peter Welch (802) 652-2450