The push is on to get a Cerificate of Public Good from the Public Service Board before there is a ruling on the appeal of Vermont Yankee/Entergy vs. the State of Vermont, and, in the interim, to block the PSB from acting to close the plant on schedule.   Entergy’s pulling out all the stops to court flagging public support for continued operation.

I don’t know if other local papers carried it, but last night the Messenger boasted a full-page ad from Vermont Yankee telling us why, on the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster,  we shouldn’t give the safety of VY another thought because they are on the case!

Was this deliberately timed to distract the public from that elephant in the corner, the plant’s poor prognosis for reliability, so that the conversation visibly revolves around an issue over which the State has no jurisdiction? Maybe that’s giving them more credit than they are due.

In any case, as Stardust alerted us several days ago, that old black magic “reliability” recently reared its ugly head again when a system failure forced a down-scaling of service.

Now that we have a better idea of what was involved, we thought it was time to revisit the incident on GMD’s front page.  VTdigger yesterday reported on the technical issue, involving a key component, that forced Vermont Yankee to begin operating at reduced capacity.  Explaining that the role of the condenser is to act somewhat like a radiator, Digger reports that its functionality was compromised in the following way:

Last November, during a planned refueling outage, plant workers applied a protective coating – an epoxy or plastic – to the tubing in the condenser… At the beginning of February, nuclear engineers at the plant discovered that the the thermal heat exchange efficiency of the condenser was greatly reduced. Last week, the plant had to lower its power production by 50 percent because back pressure was building up in the condenser.

Apparently, the coating applied to extend the life of the condenser, which dates to the plant’s start-up 40 years ago, compromised the “efficiency” of the system.  In this case “efficiency” refers to its ability to operate without a pressure build-up.

…And in the very competitive category of “I Told You So,” the winner is…Arnie Gundersen.  

When asked in his 2003 testimony to the Public Service Board to name

a component likely to have an adverse effect on reliability under extended power uprate conditions

Mr. Gundersen responded that the condenser was likely to present exactly the scenario of improper repair and subsequent failure that has now occurred.

Gundersen, of Fairewinds Associates, now predicts that this thermal issue is likely to worsen in summer:

when the water temperature of the Connecticut River rises from springtime temperatures of 50 degrees to 70 degrees.

The upshot is that further power reductions will be likely so long as the plant continues to operate with the affected condenser in the system.

Sounds like a reliability issue to me.

On a different front, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is challenging the NRC to explain how they could go ahead and extend the Vermont Yankee operating license within just days of the unprecedented disaster at Fukushima which involved reactors of exactly the same generation as the one at Vermont Yankee.

Sanders, who, a year ago called for a moratorium on relicensing aging nuclear power plants in the U.S. until there had been an opportunity to draw lessons from the Fukushima chain of collapse, today chastised the agency for its unwillingness to alter its relicensing initiatives, and the federal government as a whole for policy that heavily subsidizes the nuclear industry and does not respect the right of a state like Vermont to phase out aging nuclear facilities in favor of sustainable energy built on other platforms.

“In my state there is a strong feeling that we want to go forward with energy efficiency and sustainable energy. I believe that we have that right. I believe that every other state in the country has that right,” Sanders said. “If we want to move to sustainable energy and not maintain an aging, trouble-plagued nuclear power plant, I think we should be allowed to do that.”