As the Messenger doesn’t share its “Letters” online, suffice it to say this was my response not only to a letter from Mr. January that appeared in the March 19 paper, but also to the full page ad that Entergy ran in the Messenger last week and Emerson Lynn’s editorial on the subject that is referenced by Mr. January.

Richard January, who blames the state for its efforts to close Vermont Yankee when the original 40-year operating license expires Thursday, failed to disclose in his Letter to the Editor, that he is the Senior Lead Engineer at the facility.

Unlike Mr. January, I have no professional ties either to the industry or to the legislature; so I am free to visit the “elephant in the room” which the State is not even allowed to acknowledge.  I refer, of course, to the fact that continued  operation of Vermont Yankee is simply unsafe.

The facility operates precisely the same reactor design as that of Fukushima 1;  but rather than reserve judgment about Vermont Yankee’s safety until after some of the questions raised by the Fukushima failures could be answered, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission went ahead and rubber-stamped Vermont Yankee’s permit to operate within two days after the Japanese disaster.  They didn’t even bother to inspect Vermont Yankee before issuing a new operating license.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time and space here explaining all the design flaws that figured into the chain of accident at Fukushima.  That information is readily available at a growing number of reputable sites on the internet.  It is only necessary to say that most of those design flaws were known both to TEPCO and the NRC for over thirty years, which is why GE BWR Mark 1 reactors have been eliminated as a design option for new reactors since then.

Completely apart from the flawed designs, there is the fact of Entergy’s lack of transparency and mismanagement of countless condition issues at the geriatric facility, which would not have been tolerated in a properly functioning regulatory environment.

In light of all this, Senator Sanders and others are now challenging the NRC to justify its decision to ignore common sense following Fukushima, when it blithely issued the new license without any review or reassessment.

It’s high-time that the agency, so long engaged in promoting rather than effectively regulating the industry, is challenged on its exclusive purview over reactor safety.  It’s time to fire the fox who’s been guarding the henhouse. But that doesn’t help Vermont, which is facing an uncertain future in the shadow of a dangerous relic at Vermont Yankee.

All the economic arguments for continued operation of Vermont Yankee fail on close examination, and the frequently repeated myth that it represents 600 Vermont jobs is simply untrue.  More than half that number are not even resident in Vermont; and the state is already proving that it does not need to buy power from VY in order to enjoy one of the better economic recoveries in the nation.

It seems, in a world increasingly opposed to the heavily subsidized, environmentally unsustainable role of nuclear energy,  it is a spectacularly poor public relations decision on the part of Entergy to continue to operate Vermont Yankee in defiance of the duly elected state legislature, the governor; and now, the Public Service Board.  To do so is to operate in defiance of the people of Vermont, and risks turning half-a-million former rate-payers into a giant anti-nuclear lobby and an embarrassment to the industry as a whole.

It is the last desperate gesture of a company headed for ruin and indifferent to how many lives it puts in jeopardy as it extracts the last bit of profit from a dying facility before abandoning it and its accompanying waste pile as a toxic legacy to our children’s children, into the vanishing point of distant time.

Sue Prent