Not that it should come as any surprise, but Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)  has just admitted that they have massively underestimated  the amount of radiation released by the crippled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, due to “improper measurement.”

“We are very sorry, but we found cases in which beta radiation readings turned out to be wrong when the radioactivity concentration of a sample was high,” TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told a press conference. Beta ray-emitting radioactive materials include strontium-90.

Guilty of epic fail in the realm of public safety, TEPCO is still inexplicably controlling operations at the site of the worst nuclear disaster in peacetime history.

It doesn’t take much to imagine that this latest revelation is just the tip of the radioactive iceberg.

Since the first day of the disaster, there has been an ongoing conspiracy afoot to keep much of the unfolding story shrouded in secrecy for as long as possible.  

This has been done almost exclusively to protect the corporation, and the industry associated with it, from total collapse.  By limiting the effectiveness of the evacuation zone, falsely minimizing the risk posed by radiation exposure in general, and fudging the data from Fukushima exposures in particular, those who collaborated to protect the industry callously sacrificed the public good.

Thyroid cancers are spiking among children in Fukushima prefecture; but the official position is that escaped radiation from the accident is “unlikely” to be the cause.

How many times did the public receive assurances that meltdown would not occur; that contamination could be contained; that groundwater wouldn’t be contaminated; that the ocean fisheries would be unaffected?  If these were not the most bald-faced lies, the only alternative is that TEPCO is singularly incompetent.

In either case, there is absolutely no legitimate excuse for the Japanese government to have left them in control for so long.

Washington’s perennial White Knight and my own favorite DC delegate, Senator Bernie Sanders, appears poised to do it again.

Asserting the privilege enjoyed by those rare individuals who can claim some independence in the captive environment of  Capitol Hill, the Senator may be ready to take on the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act.

For half a century, this stealth cost-shift mechanism has allowed the nuclear industry to enjoy an unfair advantage in the market for alternative energy over solar, wind, geo-thermal and anything else that might come down the pike.

Drafted in the infancy of atomic energy initiatives to give that fledgling U.S. industry a unique leg-up over conventional energy sources, Price-Anderson continues to artificially prop-up  the nuclear balance sheet.  

While lending nuclear a competitive edge, Price Anerson disadvantages truly clean energy alternatives that have been developing in the interim.

Under the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, which Congress first passed in 1957 and has since renewed several times, the liability of nuclear power plant operators in the event of a disaster is limited.

As provided for under Price Anderson, the U.S. nuclear industry collectively pays into an “insurance account” which is available to fund the collateral costs of a nuclear emergency.  The industry’s maximum liability is capped at the amount in the fund.  The current value of that fund is estimated at $12-billion dollars.

To put that figure into perspective, the cost of the single disaster at Fukushima has been estimated at $80-billion dollars.

And, who gets to take up the slack?  Why the American taxpayers, of course!

…documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in recent years show that the federal government has not decided on a plan for how the actual cleanup of the contaminated area surrounding a compromised nuclear facility would be paid for.

In 2009, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials informed their counterparts at the Homeland Security Department and the Environmental Protection Agency that the Price Anderson money likely would not be available to pay for offsite cleanup.

Hello!

Holding what amounts to a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, the American nuclear industry has enjoyed the double advantage over other energy industries of paying a significantly reduced premium for insurance and being able to make the public claim that nuclear energy was “cheap.”

When Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer recently criticized the NRC’s slow uptake of lessons from Fukushima, Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma sniffed

“that perhaps we are trying to regulate the nuclear energy industry out business, just like we’re trying to regulate the fossil fuels business out of business.”

To which Senator Sanders responded by offering that perhaps Senator Inhofe might like to join him in introducing legislation to repeal Price-Anderson in order to

“get government out of the nuclear industry.”

Now that the proverbial gauntlet has been thrown down, I hope we’ll see Bernie follow through.

Brad Ferland has been, and I assume still is, a paid lobbyist for Vermont Yankee; so it surprised me to find his opinion piece occupying the paper’s editorial position in the Weekend Messenger.

Be that as it may, Mr. Ferland raises the question of why more members of the public did not show up for the January 14 Public Service Board Hearing on Vermont Yankee.   Mr. Ferland seems to think that the forty citizens who did testify represents a negligible number; but be that as it may, I know why I did not, so I can hazard a guess why others did not as well.

The hearing was held on a Tuesday at 7:00 PM.    Leave aside the fact that it was a work night for most of us, and the driving conditions were less than ideal, many people had other meetings and obligations on the night in question. That is why the PSB collects statements through a link on their website, from people who are unable to be physically present.

Mr. Ferland fails to mention that one of the key issues under consideration by the PSB, is the fact that Vermont Yankee prefers to save itself some money by not using the facility’s cooling towers in order to bring its water discharges to a temperature that will not harm aquatic life in the Connecticut River.   Continued operation by VY under these circumstance, even for a year, has an impact on our already fragile river resources.

The settlement that Mr. Ferland refers to so glowingly, may not be all that it’s cracked-up to be.  Much of the supposed “benefit” to Vermont comes from a chunk of cash that is supposed to be used to promote economic development.  “Economic development” funds often find their way into already well-lined pockets, and seldom seem to reach the folks who are most in need of help.

When this veil is stripped away, Vermont really does come out on the distinctly losing side of the bargain.  And the potential for that loss grows even greater the longer that Entergy postpones decommissioning of Vermont Yankee; because the parent company is not as robust as one might hope for an entity that must be trusted decades ahead of time to finish the job properly in our childrens’ lifetime.

Entergy’s quality and safety control reputation has suffered numerous blows over the past couple of years, but none more spectacular than when they blacked-out last year’s Super Bowl Game!

And we are counting on these folks to keep a lid on the pressure cooker at VY far into the distant future?  If I were a betting woman, I would put my money on Vermont Yankee slipping out from under that obligation with some kind of sleazy financial sidestep.  

Talk about allowing Entergy time to grow the decommissioning fund makes me laugh.  They’ve had forty years of extremely profitable operation in which to cultivate that fund.  All that remains fairly certain is that the taxpayers of Vermont will, inevitably, be stuck with much of the bill for cleaning-up what Entergy leaves behind.

“Economic development” funds?  Chump change.

In recent news, the Mayor of Newark accused the Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey of trying to exert undue influence in order to push through a pet development.  

The complaint struck a familiar chord for me, as it sounds like the kind of garden variety corruption that routinely plagues even the smallest of cities and towns.

Giddy with TIF fever, the City of St. Albans has some “goings on” of its own that bear careful scrutiny.  I am referring to the current controversy over the fate of the historic Smith House/Owl Club, and the conspiracy to retool an entire neighborhood in order to accommodate a speculative development by one of the state’s most powerful construction companies, Connor Contracting.  

I began to tell the story on GMD some months ago, after the local Development Review Board, chaired by the first cousin of the four brothers who own Connor Contracting, issued a permit for demolition of the historically designated landmark and endorsed the developer’s non-conforming speculative office building as the replacement.  In so doing, the DRB ignored the fact that the developers had not satisfied even the basic requirements for a demolition permit, and that the City’s Design Advisory Board had unanimously recommended against the changes to street-level parking and destruction of greenspace that the Connor brothers’ proposal entails.

When challenged by members of the community over their failure to enforce City rules and the inappropriateness of the developers’ plans, the City Council refused to vacate the decision and send everything back for a proper review.  Instead they forced us, the near neighbors, to appeal the DRB decision in environmental court.  Rather than take responsibility for the failure of their own appointed permit body to enforce the law, the Council members actually said that they preferred to let a judge decide!

We are now in the midst of the demolition appeal process, with a merits hearing set to take place sometime in May.

Meanwhile… back at City Hall:  Because the Connors’ parking plan required the City to yield its right-of-way so that diagonal parking would make it possible to cram additional cars onto tiny Maiden Lane, it was necessary to obtain permission directly from the City Council for that aspect of the plan.

We, the neighbors who use Maiden Lane, citing safety concerns for the busy little laneway, formally requested the City to do a traffic study before coming to a decision.

Once again, despite the fact  that the City’s own appointed Design Advisory Board had unanimously opposed the plan, and ignoring the public request for a traffic study, the City Council members hastily approved the proposal. In support of their approval, City Manager Dominic Cloud offered a two page ‘opinion’ by the captive engineering firm that is in charge of their streetscape.  

As perfunctory and tainted by conflict of interest as the opinion was, even that could not wholeheartedly endorse the Connors’ proposal, recommending instead an alternative that was unacceptable to the Connors.  

Nevermind the fact that it was Connor Contracting that was responsible for the failed parking design that is already in existence on Maiden Lane in front of the library!

The Council’s reason for rushing?  They actually said, once again, that we, the neighbors would undoubtedly appeal; so, in order to allow the court to “roll both appeals together;” and so as not to further delay the developers’ project, they would simply approve it out of hand, and let the judge decide!

Even though there are two attorneys sitting on the City Council, Tim Hawkins and James Pelkey, they all seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that any appeal of the City’s parking decision wouldn’t even be heard by the Environmental Court; it would be heard instead by Superior Court and follow a completely separate schedule, costing everyone an additional bundle to litigate.  

The next time someone complains to me about “frivolous” permit appeals, will he ever get an earful!

 

The Chairman of the Design Advisory Board ( a subset of the Planning Commission), Chris Dermody, actually spoke up before the Council made its decision, saying that the board had specifically opposed the changes and sent a memo to the DRB about this and the fact that the applicants had not satisfied the minimum requirements for obtaining a demolition permit for an historic property.  He asked why that memo was nowhere in the record of the DRB review.  He didn’t get an answer.

Last week, when the Design Advisory Board was to hold its next hearing, with the new ACE Hardware store looking for a change to its permit, Mr. Dermody adjourned the meeting without doing any business, making a statement that there was no point in continuing their work if the City disrespects their opinion.

The City’s failures to honor its responsibilities in this matter are becoming so numerous at this point that it really requires much more explanation than I can cram into this diary; so I have laced it with links to Michelle Monroe’s exemplary coverage in the St. Albans Messenger.

Developers enjoying political favors while the public good is left to twist in the wind?  It doesn’t only happen in New Jersey.

We like to think of Vermont as a “green” state; but, when it comes to just getting around, we have failed, so far, to be very proactive.

Our public transportation alternatives for moving around the state are abysmal; so much so that a few years ago, I recall reading that we have the highest carbon footprint per capita of any state in the nation.

Now, that negative impact threatens to grow even greater, as a steadily increasing volume of tar-sands-derived gasoline fills our tanks and chokes the landscape around us.

Quoting from a Natural Resources Defense Council report,  the Vermont Natural Resource Council tells us:

The NRDC report found that under current plans, tar sands-derived gasoline supplies in 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, including Vermont, would soar from less than one percent of the total in 2012 to 11.5 percent of the total by 2020, due to increased imports from Canadian refineries, fresh supplies of refined tar sands fuels from Gulf Coast refineries, and quantities from East Coast refineries that would obtain tar sands crude via rail and barge.

According to Danielle Droitsch, NRDC Canada Project Director,

“Dirty gasoline supplies in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are set to rise significantly, unless states take steps to keep out high-carbon fuel,” said Danielle Droitsch, NRDC Canada Project Director.  “By 2015 the volume of tar sands-derived fuel in the Northeast could grow sixfold, compared to 2012. This shows how important it is to move as quickly as possible to clean energy of all types.”

The VNRC reminds us that Vermont has made a commitment to reducing green-house gas emissions by 50-percent, as of 2028; and by 75-percent, as of 2050.  That’s a commendable goal, but much of the value of those reductions will be lost if the emissions we do produce come from significantly dirtier fuel sources, like the Canadian tar sands.

Says Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation’s Vermont office:

“Tar sands expansion – which requires leveling the land and stripmining the fuel – is threatening to turn much of North America’s most productive bird nursery into a Mordor-like wasteland,” he said. “We need to keep this dirtiest of fuels in the ground, not in our tanks.”

Cheap gas isn’t cheap at all, when you consider what lies not very far ahead if we accept the growing exploitation of tar sands fuels.

We, the consumers must make it clear to our representatives that we do not want to fuel our present-day transportation needs at the expense of the planet’s future.

Ask our legislature to take a stand against tar sands oil, and tell President Obama that Vermont doesn’t support the Keystone XL pipeline.

Following several years of costly court battles and acrimonious exchanges between the Town and City of St. Albans over water and sewer allocations, in the truest sense of the phrase, there is no winner.

Rather like the parent of two spoiled children might despairingly rule that “nobody gets ice cream,” Judge Dennis Pearson of Vermont Superior Court has declared the disputed wastewater agreement null and void.

“Now go to your rooms and think about what you did.”

(Happily, I can link you to the excellent front page story by Michelle Monroe of the Messenger that gives all of the gory details.)

In the tradition of country feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys, officials of the City and Town of St. Albans have been trying to get the best of each other for decades, but can’t even offer a credible explanation of what started the whole thing.

Since both municipalities are afflicted with galloping cronyism and opacity of process, it is doubtful that mystery will ever be adequately cleared up other than to say that the big dairying families that control the Town have a deep-seated suspicion of the big commerce and finance families who control the City; and vice-versa.  

As some intermarriage has occurred in the century since the two parted ways, there’s an overlay of some complexity obscuring simple loyalties and leaving most of us relative newcomers completely in the dark.

Introduce to this  smoldering distrust the need to work closely in order to obtain and manage the most essential element for survival and development: water rights; and you’ve got yourself a situation that will serve nobody’s best interests except those of the lawyers.

Anyone who has followed details of the evidence presented over the past few years could have predicted the outcome; but we are grateful to the Judge for having summarized the situation so succinctly.

“…they (the Town and the City) are no further…toward achieving the necessary working arrangement(s) on this and other issues…which any reasonably dispassionate outside observer can…see must, and…could, be resolved if only all of the emotional and historical baggage was checked at the door.”

He goes on to say,

“For better or worse, the town and city are now functionally a single economic zone of interlocking and symbiotic interests…”

The judge has determined that, as the wording of the agreement regarding water and sewer allocations was so vague as to readily lead to disputes, that agreement never had any validity to begin with.

There is plenty of blame for everyone in this two-town tantrum, but City Manager Dominic Cloud must bear much of the blame, for it was he who stepped in at the last moment back in 2009 to revise the agreement with the language that now forms the basis for the dispute.  

Characteristically, as we later learned, Manager Cloud seems to have acted impulsively to head-off a breakdown that was threatening the timely signing of the agreement.

I say “characteristically'” because the machinations by the City Manager to jump-start a couple of his pet TIF projects have betrayed a similar impulse to act a little too quickly, exposing the City to additional costs that might otherwise have been avoided.

The amateurs who run the City and the Town share some of the blame for not seeking better advice before entering into the meaningless agreement.  But Dominic Cloud is a professional, having done service with the League of Towns and Cities.  Presumably, that’s why he gets the big bucks.

How’s this going to look on that resume?

It’s always informative to look back to authoritative representations made in the early days of a crisis like Fukushima and see how well they align with reality a couple of years down the line.

Maybe you remember that infamous MIT study that seemed deliberately engineered to mislead about the dangers of radiation.

Therapeutically injected into the PR fallout from the world’s worst nuclear accident (which was not, as yet, identified as such), the MIT study took the rather astonishing position that it might not have been necessary to evacuate people from the region around the crippled reactors! It was very popular and widely quoted at the time; and probably gave some poor folks in northern Japan a short-lived sense of security.

If you were paying attention after then, we came rather quickly to understand that MIT was so dependent on support from the nuclear industry that its research in the area could no longer be trusted.

I haven’t heard much reference to those literally incredible findings in the intervening years, but they are no doubt deeply embedded in every proposal for a new nuclear facility that comes into play.

Much like the truncated and censored records drawn from survivors of the WWII nuclear attacks in Japan that form the basis of conventional wisdom even to this day;  the myth of harmlessness generated by this latest attempt to skew the science in favor of the nuclear industry will have a half-life as long as plutonium.  

But, hang on!

Here comes news that, even using the questionable benchmarks established by the post-WW II  records and the equally questionable records from Chernobyl (where Soviet officials are believed to have deliberately expunged much of the data), it can be estimated that the  incidence of thyroid cancer in Fukushima survivors will be one-in-fifty, or seven times the normal rate.

Now…can I interest you in some Japanese farmland that’s going very cheap these days?

That radioactive mess over in Japan?  It just keeps getting worse.

And it’s leaching out into the environment at an alarming rate.

According to Tokyo Electric Power Co., an evaluation of radiation exposure caused by toxic water, rubble and debris, and other waste kept at the plant was below the limit of 1 millisievert per year as of March, but increased to 7.8 millisieverts as of August.

Just for your interest, measurements taken at the perimeter of the premises indicate radiation to be eight times the regulatory limit and rising.

The source has been identified as stored contaminated water from the cooling process.  Think about that when you consider the decades and decades of suspense that Vermont’s aquifer must endure before our own little hot-pot, Vermont Yankee, has been effectively “neutralized.”

And they want to build more of these environmental time bombs?

If that wasn’t enough to give one pause, how about this:  remember all the assurance we had in the early days of Fukushima, that the ocean is a “big place” in which radiation will be diffused and we won’t have to worry about contamination reaching the aquatic life?

Well, it has just been reported that black sea bream have been caught off the coast of Japan with levels of cesium as high as twenty-four-times the acceptable standards for food.  

Four out of thirty-seven fish sampled had unacceptable levels of the radioactive toxin.

Black sea bream are

on the list of fish that local fishermen are asked to voluntarily refrain from catching in the northern municipalities of Ibaraki Prefecture, which is located just south of Fukushima Prefecture.

(my emphasis added.)

‘Ya think?

I was pleased to read that Democratic Speaker Shap Smith is supporting a bill  designed to give the private public a greater voice before the public service board.

Heretofore, small advocacy groups who wished to have a place at the table, but did not have the personal resources of their corporate challengers, had to rely on the pockets of organizations like AARP to represent them, en masse.

In an era when the individual’s opportunity to gain relevance in the process has grown steadily smaller, while the corporate megaphone has grown exponentially louder, we can only hope that this signals a change in direction that will not be effectively negated by the increased opportunity to stuff candidate’s pockets with “wish money.”  Sometimes, the schizophrenia of our Legislature really gives one pause!

Over the past decade or two, one of the most popular campaign platforms of the Republicans, has been a promise to “reform” the permit process, which we came to understand means limiting the opportunity for those annoying citizens to participate and potentially throw a monkey wrench in the well-greased wheels along the fast track to commercial development.  Even our Democratic governor appears to have fallen under the spell of the Republican argument; because, as the mantra goes, only continual “growth” is good.  

Nevermind the restraining concept of sustainability; it’s become the fashion to pay it lip-service while rationalizing policy that is anything-but.

Citizen participation that slows the process may be annoying to the big players, but it is, after all, one of the main reasons why Vermont did not suffer as greatly in the recent real estate bubble collapse as did other states.

Please give us more of the same, Mr. Speaker.  

They say politics makes for strange bedfellows; and that is no more so than right here in Vermont where conservatives are fading like fireflies,  and the lion’s share of power and influence is carried in Democratic

hands.

All of which makes our particular brand of Republican-lite occasionally champion issues more usually associated with progressive thinkers.  When that happens, once in a blue moon, it behooves us to seize the opportunity to stand on common ground.

So it is with Bruce Lisman of the Campaign for Vermont, who is finally getting down to some respectable brass tacks.  After a couple of years of expounding vaguely about how Vermont policymakers should do “better,” in language straight out of the Republican playbook, Mr. Lisman is actually proposing some pretty radical stuff.

He wants Vermont lawmakers to adopt sweeping transparency rules in the interests of ending cronyism, nepotism and all manner of conflicts of interest.

And I say, “Why not?”

Obviously, Mr. Lisman proposes this from the conservative minority position, in the hope of reducing the huge advantage that Democratic policy enjoys in the state; but no matter what motivates the effort, its time has come.

Mr. Lisman points to the terrible marks Vermont gets for transparency, relative to the rest of the country; and he is absolutely right that we can improve that situation dramatically with a few simple rules.  

He does, however, focus primarily on statewide transparency issues, making it appear to be more of a Democratic failing.  In reality, the failure peculiar to Vermont has its roots in the intimacy of local politics, which generally falls outside traditional parameters of “Democrats” and “Republicans”  even when those labels are nominally applied.

As I have said on many occasions, that intimacy is both the strength of Vermont’s democracy and its greatest challenge.  The clannish nature of local influence blocks frequently obscures the process and discourages challenges of any sort.  Casual conflicts of interest are so common in many towns as to go completely unremarked.

But before a bright light can be shone on the manner in which conflicts of interest control the local process, it is first necessary that strict transparency rules be adopted at the state level, as a model of good behavior.

Mr. Lisman may have finally found a way to be relevant in Vermont; and, while I rather doubt that we will agree on much in the future, on the need to address conflicts of interest in the political process we seem to be of one mind.