If you answered “Ten percent less than we thought,” you’d be correct. At least, Entergy Nuclear hopes so. VTDigger has the story, along with an accompanying photo of 2007’s cooling tower collapse (ah, memories):

Entergy Corp., which owns the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, is preparing to cut back its labor force in an effort to reorganize the company.

… A source inside the Vernon plant says managers are telling workers that the company could lay off 10 percent of the facility’s roughly 650 workers.

The Vermont cuts are part of a company-wide “human capital management strategic imperative,” which is how the people who have sold their souls for a corporate PR gig refer to FIRING WORKERS. That’s right, Entergy is following the IBM path to prosperity.

The move comes after a disappointing second-quarter earnings result. Entergy places most of the blame on large increases in income tax payments, due to a one-time quirk; 2012’s second quarter saw a big write-off of storm-damage cleanup costs in Louisiana, Entergy’s home state.

But you’d think, if the earnings drop was really a one-time thing, it shouldn’t cause a company-wide retraction. And you’d be right; Entergy is whistling past the graveyard.

After the jump: “Economic reality has slammed the door on nuclear power.”

Again, VTDigger:

Mark Cooper, a senior economics fellow at Vermont Law School, published a paper Wednesday titled, “Renaissance in Reverse: Competition Pushes Aging U.S. Nuclear Reactors to the Brink of Economic Abandonment.”

… “Economic reality has slammed the door on nuclear power,” Cooper concluded. “In the near-term old reactors are uneconomic because lower cost alternatives have squeezed their cash margins to the point where they no longer cover the cost of nuclear operation … In the long term new reactors are uneconomic because there are numerous low-carbon alternatives that are less costly and less risk (sic).”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Entergy is trying to find out how few Vermonters it takes to run a nuclear power plant.

Now, it’s good fun to chortle at Entergy’s dire straits, but it does beg the fundamental question, as posed in VTDigger’s comments section by one Moshe Braner:

We should get more money from Entergy into the insufficient decommissioning fund before they go “poof.”

Yeah, if Entergy was shedding crocodile tears over the need to set aside hundreds of millions when their bottom line was healthy, how eager do you think they’ll be to restock the decomm fund now that the whole company seems to be circling the drain?