Advice to Republican gubernatorial candidate, Randy Brock:  remove cranium from nether regions.

You will not win friends and influence Vermont voters by refusing to support a resolution of protest against the Supreme’s “Citizens United” decision; not even as weakly as you just did:

“One of the problems is using a sledgehammer to crush grapes,” he said. “If the focus is money in politics, then perhaps a more narrow approach is warranted.”

In retrospect, that sledgehammer-meets-grapes analogy must sound as absurd to you as it does to us, given that that is precisely how the Citizens United decision could be characterized.  

By comparison the Vermont Senate resolution has roughly the impact of a $2.00 tack-hammer.

I don’t know what carat the RNC has been dangling hypnotically before your nose, but it ain’t worth spit here in Vermont.  I write as one of your immediate constituents, knowing that you are, on the whole, an ethical sort of guy, even though I seldom agree with the positions you adopt.

I find it difficult to believe that you, like fellow Republican, Peg Flory, think reversing Citizens United could have any effect on municipalities, since you certainly know their privileges are statutorily governed.

The Citizens United decision and the floodgates of influence-peddling it legitimized are an affront to American democracy and an insult to the stature of the Supreme Court.  Nowhere is that felt more strongly than here in the state of Vermont.

You would do well to remember that the next time you are tempted to make a gesture to appease the money-gods in DC.

Here is the link for commenting on this bill.  Or contact dawn@vermont.org

It’s flying way beneath the radar and I don’t see any attention being paid to it by other forums.  This is the way bad bills become law.  Don’t let it happen!!

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You’ll hear lots of defenders of H.513, including Governor Shumlin, insisting that the changes this bill proposes will benefit “all interested parties” by making the process “less cumbersome.”  Those soothing words are carefully selected Grade “A” baloney.  

H.513 would change the rules under Act 250 so that all opportunity to introduce evidence in the process would end with the initial District Commission decision.  Any appeal of that decision, which 98% of the time finds in favor of developers, would be considered “on the record” from the District Commission hearings.  This would change the current practice of “de novo” hearings on appeal, that allow all interested parties to introduce new evidence pertinent to the items specifically under appeal.

How would this change affect citizen access, you well might ask?  I can tell you from more than a theoretical position since I was one of a group who were given interested party status in the Act 250 review of a permit for JLDavis Properties to build a Walmart here in St. Albans.  

As was the case for us, the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth, most often when citizens seek access to the Act 250 process, they are doing so from a position of great economic disadvantage.  Developers typically approach Act 250 with much deeper pockets than any private individuals or grassroots community groups that might oppose them.  

If those private individuals or community groups are unable to bring a full compliment of legal counsel and expert witnesses before the District Commission in the initial review, under the provisions of H.513, they would not be able to reinforce their limited presentation to the District Commission with additional expert witnesses or other testimony in the appeal phase.  

In short, if concerned citizens do not have plenty of financial resources to draw from at the very beginning of Act 250 proceedings, they might as well save themselves the filing fee and give up from the start.  

H.513 essentially further tips the likely outcome of Act 250 proceedings overwhelmingly toward the developer. With a 98% success rate for developers right now, do they really need any further advantage?

Like permits in general, most people probably find the topic of Act 250 pretty dry and sexless, and that accounts for the power that developers have gained over a system initially created to give sustainable communities, the environment and local economies their shot at surviving the vagaries of a short-sighted marketplace.

When first created in 1970, it was to have been complimented by  a statewide planning piece that would have captured a vision for sustainability throughout this small but distinctively rural state.  Sadly that planning piece never bore fruit, and we were left with the incomplete toolbox of Act 250, which was still an excellent start.

It continues to be the only statewide planning tool of its magnitude in the nation.

Under the Douglas administration, Act 250 was repeatedly raided in order to weaken the public access component and make the process more “development friendly.”

As originally structured, Act 250 provided for local District Commissions to hear arguments pertinent to ten specific criteria, and render a decision as to whether or not a permit should be issued.   The District Commission, appointed by the governor did not necessarily reflect any particular expertise, but was drawn from the community presumably  representing  individuals who had credibility for their constituents.   An appeal of the District Commission decision could be made to an Environmental Board, comprised of a group of individuals, ideally with some experience or expertise that potentially gave them a deeper understanding of the ten areas of review.

Under Douglas, the Environmental Board was replaced by an Environmental Court where each appeal of a District Commission’s decision must be heard and ruled upon by a single jurist, who typically has very limited technical understanding of the criteria, but nevertheless must undertake to render a final decision on what can be a very broad spectrum of highly nuanced issues.

Yielding to pressures from developers, legislators have made repeated raids on Act 250, touting them as  “streamlining” efforts. In fact, such “streamlining” only serves to reduce public access to the process, and increase control of it by developers.

The history of narrowing citizen access to Act 250 is too long to go into here, except to say that H.513 represents a real new threat to citizen access. Please seriously consider what this could mean to the future of the state and call your representatives, now, before it’s too late.

Do you honestly want developers to drive the direction and quality of growth in this lovely little state?  How invested do you really think they are beyond satisfying their bottom line?

Without an effective Act 250 permit system gently applying the coasting brakes in Vermont on development that was running away almost everywhere else in America a few short years ago, we would now be looking at a far worse economic situation at home than we are.

The latest unemployment figures released by the Department of Labor seem to suggest otherwise.

At just 4.9%, we’ve finally dipped below the 5% mark.

Vermont had the fourth-lowest unemployment among the states in February. The national rate remained at 8.3 percent.

And, in more myth-busting news, the number of government jobs here has dropped by 1,400 over the past year, while private industry has added 4,700.

Earth to Governor Shumlin: time to drop the rest of the Douglas meme and consider nudging-up revenues with a nickel-search in the fat pockets of those for whom the recession is long over.

It looks like the fat-trimming has gone just about far enough.

President Obama’s so-called “microphone gaffe” is getting a lot of play among Republican pundits, long bored by the interminable squabbling and embarrassments of their own primary season, but look for it on TPM or Huffington Post and you’ll struggle to find it in the queue.

Now, where did I put that lawn sign?

If I revisit the topic of nuclear energy frequently, it is only because the surrounding issues remain so distressingly unresolved both here in Vermont and in Japan; and because new and concerning information seems to be discovered on far too regular a basis.

Case in point: it appears that the inadequacy of established evacuation zones for nuclear plants in Japan has been known to officials both here and in Japan since quite some time.

According to Enformable.com:

it has become known that the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) had proposed freezing studies conducted by the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) to expand the range of the priority disaster mitigation zone from the current radius of between 8 and 10 kilometers from a nuclear power plant in the event of a disaster in 2006.

Their reasoning?

The agency, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (of Japan), argued that expansion of the zones “could cause social unrest and increase popular anxiety,” emails released by the commission showed.

It seems likely that this culture of rationalized deniability is as pervasive among U.S. regulators as it was in Japan.

The effectiveness of Vermont Yankee’s evacuation plan in light of lessons that could be learned from Fukushima is one of a number of issues that were never considered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in their hurried decision to relicense VY, made less than 72 hours after the accident.

In the latest video from Fairewinds Assoc., Arnie Gundersen reports that five random soil samples he personally collected in Tokyo and brought back to the U.S. for testing, all registered levels of contamination that, were they considered under U.S. regulations, would have required shipment to Texas for disposal by the DOD.   As he points out, the reactors at Fukushima were twice as distant from that nation’s capitol as are ten different nuclear plants to Washington, DC.

Tokyo Soil Samples Would Be Considered Nuclear Waste In The US from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

This story just keeps heating up again.  In  tonight’s Messenger (3/28) Michelle Monroe reveals that the court order drafted by Mr. Luneau’s attorney, Paul Gillies, at Judge Linda Leavitt’s instructions differs markedly from factual representations made in court.  The order is supposed to represent the judge’s factual basis for ordering a new election.  Because the judge has now signed Mr. Gillies erroneous Order, it has to be asked whether the judge read the Order before signing it; or did she have a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts?

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Vermont is as much a tapestry of small town democracies as it is a cohesive whole.  From time to time something plays out on the smaller scale that speaks volumes about the greater process.  

In that light, the disputed Ward 5 aldermanic race in St. Albans represents a teachable moment.  

The long and the short of it is that Joe Luneau, who came up the loser in every one of a series of close recounts against winner Ryan Doyle, challenged the outcome in a court of law and has been rewarded with a do-over.  

Not interested in embroiling the City in further expense and distraction for the sake of a single ward seat; and, in any case, unable to afford legal representation; Doyle will not be challenging the court decision. Nevertheless, many here in the City (perhaps the majority?) feel it represents both a glaring miscarriage of justice and a distortion of local democracy.

The match-up between blue collar wage-earner Ryan Doyle and businessman/incumbent Joe Luneau was, from the start, a David vs. Goliath situation.  

Luneau, the son of a powerful local family headed by Karen Luneau, seemed a sure-thing to win a second term on the City Council and further advance his hereditary claim to the throne.  He had already begun to cement a bloc of allies on the Council and seemed likely to lead them, in a new term, as an unstoppable coalition.

There had been speculation that Luneau would skip the second term entirely and run immediately for mayor, but an early announcement by Democrat Liz Gamache, an extremely popular ex interim City Manager made it extremely unlikely that he would be able to win the seat before Liz had at least one term under her belt on which to be criticized.

Doyle is a bright young independent who has never had anything handed to him on a silver spoon.  He has been volunteering in the community for planning and downtown improvement initiatives since he was in high shool.  After completing a degree in civil engineering, Doyle was finding it impossible to find dependable work in his trade, so he took shift work at a factory while satisfying his passion for civic engagement by volunteering to serve on the planning commission.

He is bright and eager and humble and above all else, one of the most idealistically ethical young men you could ever wish to meet.  We didn’t give him the chance of a snowball in hell against the Karen Luneau machine.

Luneau’s signs soon bristled all over the City, not just in Ward 5 where his family’s Toyota dealership is currently located.  He paired his campaign with that of the scion of another powerful St. Albans Family, Will Howrigan who was challenging Chad Spooner of Ward 6, to join the Luneau voting bloc on the council.  

Both Spooner and Doyle agreed that accepting donations for the race would be against their ethical principles so they, too, pooled what little resources they had, depending mostly on shoe-leather and word-of-mouth to win the support of their constituents.  

According to records, the team of Luneau and Howrigan spent roughly $2,000.  which included hosting a pancake breakfast. Doyle and Spooner, together, spent under $500.

“I have student debt and I have a blue collar job,” said Doyle.

Despite conventional wisdom that, against Luneau’s money and influence, he hadn’t a chance; when the ballots were in, Doyle had defeated Luneau by just a couple of votes.

Following the first tally, a couple more ballots  turned-up among the BFA (school) ballots, having been mistakenly deposited in the wrong box.  They only served to widen Doyle’s margin of victory.  

Over the weekend, the ballots were recounted and several innocent mishaps involving City Clerk Sue Krupp occurred; but the tallies all came down on Doyle’s side.  Nevertheless, Luneau refused to accept defeat and announced he would be challenging the election, due to the  “mishandling of ballots.”

An amusing side-note is that one of the poll volunteers, whose job it was to guide voters as to which box (City or BFA) should receive which ballot, was Mr. Luneau’s own brother.

On Monday, March 12, Ryan Doyle was sworn-in and took his seat at the Council table.

Now it seems he will have to go through the whole campaign cycle again; this time unaccompanied by Spooner, who easily defeated Howrigan.

“Everyone is coming to me, angry basically, with what happened and wanting to volunteer,” said Doyle.”I will not be accepting any financial support…This is a small town election and not even a whole town election, just a small part of it.”

What does he think his prospects are in the upcoming re-vote?  

Doyle is concerned about turnout in a special election. Low turnout, in Doyle’s view, would benefit his opponent.  “There are people that they call. There are people that they give rides to,” said Doyle of his opponent’s campaign. When turnout is low that group becomes a higher percentage of voters.

Stay tuned.

While awaiting review of Vermont Yankee by the PSB, and beaching of the waste field from Fukushima on U.S. shores, we who are not constrained from discussing issues of safety can consider  this little nugget from Enformable.

It seems that Tokyo is not without its own fallout issues from Fukushima.  Despite early efforts by industry regulators to downplay both the scope and severity of contamination,

“The nuclear accident in Japan has resulted in widespread deposition of radioactive contamination throughout the northern part of Japan, including the metropolitan Tokyo area. Surface contamination levels in this entire region would be required to be posted as radiological area if they were at a U.S. licensed facility or DOE site.

This “widespread deposition” has implications for the U.S. that go beyond the path of the plume and ocean-born waste.  According to Enformable, an April 2011 teleconference involving U.S. and Japanese officials delved into concerns about what might be entering the U.S. through conventional import channels:

Any materials leaving Japan have the potential for low levels of radioactive contamination. Thus, the discussion about materials in DOD possession is indicative of similar materials that are entering commerce from Japan. In the DC and IPC meetings earlier this week, it was agreed that the limit of 4 Bq/cm2 for commerce was going to be acceptable and posed no health risk.”

Apparently there was some discussion as to whether the Department of Defense should become involved in licensing and disposal of the contaminated material that would be inadvertently imported under this scenario, but the DOD was reluctant to become involved. Their preference was that the contaminated material simply be returned to Japan, but that was impractical under the circumstances.  The teleconference appears to have been inconclusive:

The regulatory provisions cited by members discussed the regulatory aspects of normal commerce in radioactive materials. It is not clear that these provisions would apply to widely scattered accident fallout that has placed low level contaminated material in the hands of many unregulated people and on material that will be entering commerce throughout the world.

To round out that cosmic head-scratcher, here is a video recorded on the first anniversary of the accident, which features Arnie Gundersen of Vermont’s Fairewinds Associates speaking with “Democracy Now” about some of the “Lessons from Fukushima” and the fact that the NRC has so far shown little indication of a willingness to learn from them.  

Gundersen: Fukushima Meltdown Could Result in One Million Cases of Cancer from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.

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

Any debate over nuclear power will have one side insisting that it’s a “cheap and environmentally responsible” source of energy, with the other side countering that it isn’t cheap unless heavily subsidized in the construction phase, and that its “responsible” credential has recently come very much into doubt.

But proponents have, so far,  successfully kept the mainstream media from linking to the elephant in the room: the issue of what to do with the waste.

That question was never even raised in a recent high-profile PBS Frontline story that has been questioned for its apparent industry bias.  

The program looked at the prospects of nuclear energy, post-Fukushima, and seemed to be arguing that any country that chooses, as Germany has, to withdraw from the nuclear school is behaving irrationally and will live to regret the decision, since they can not possibly function off the nuclear grid.  Of course, even as the program was aired, Japan was demonstrating rather well how to do just that in the face of an economic crisis that was generated by a natural disaster but compounded by the mismanagement of its nuclear industry.

The good people of Japan have another dilemma on their hands, though. As an industrialized island nation that, for forty years, was heavily invested in nuclear energy to supply its power needs, the waste issue now rears its ugly head.

Spent fuel from Japanese power generation is currently finding temporary storage in on-site pools at reactor sites, but TEPCO has plans to move these materials to the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture. The facility was still in the construction phase when the disaster occurred at Fukushima, causing the work to be suspended.  As planned, reprocessing at the plant could not, in any case, have handled all the waste being produced, and there is currently no alternative in sight.

TEPCO wants to resume construction of the plant, but locals are concerned that, if reprocessing and reuse never actually occurs, (which grows more and more likely as nuclear power falls from favor in Japan), the Rokkasho facility could become the final dumping ground for massive amounts of nuclear waste; a use for which it was never designed.

Long before the Fukushima accidents shone a bright light on TEPCO’s practices, their spent fuel management was out of control:

Last November, TEPCO released a report detailing how they have managed to store more than 10,000 fuel assemblies at the cooling ponds at Fukushima Daiichi as part of a program to consolidate spent fuel elements before putting them in a prospective interim storage facility in Mutsu, Japan. The Mutsu facility is designed to store spent nuclear fuel in above-ground storage for up to 50 years before it is reprocessed.

The Japanese program for waste management is unsustainable, as it is dependent on a fully functioning energy use of plutonium from reprocessed nuclear waste.  The isolation of plutonium has inherent issues itself, including the fact that, since it is nuclear weapon capable, stockpiling is strictly prohibited.

Then there is this little downside:

Reprocessing increases the volume of nuclear waste which must be stored. The increase occurs because the chemicals process for separating the plutonium, uranium, and HLW from spent nuclear fuel generates much greater volumes of waste than the original volume of the spent nuclear fuel. Although most of the radioactivity is concentrated in the high level waste, reprocessing is responsible for a substantial increase in the total volume of low and intermediate level waste which must then be dealt with.

So, are we in the U.S. doing any better than Japan in addressing the long-time storage of nuclear waste?  The short answer is no.

A long-term storage facility was planned and partially constructed at Yucca Mountain  in the State of Nevada, but questions about the site’s suitability and strong resistance from Nevada residents have led to suspension of the project.  The prospects for finding another site are looking dim.  

In the U.S. spent fuel is dealt with more or less as it is in Japan: onsite storage at individual facilities in “dry casks”  following time in spent fuel pools where discarded fuel assemblies must be kept cool until transfer to dry cask storage is possible.

Spent fuel pools are reaching capacity in many locations and alternatives are not presenting themselves.  Dry casks await pick-up that, lacking a destination, never comes to pass.

The spent fuel pools themselves represent risk in a prolonged power-outage, do not have the same level of protection as the active reactors; and those like the ones at Fukushima and Vermont Yankee are potentially more vulnerable to attack simply because they are located above grade rather than below.

It’s not just our children and our grandchildren who will have to deal with the consequences of our appetite for nuclear energy, but our grand-children’s descendants… into the vanishing point of distant time.  

Entergy might be careful what it wishes for in future.  After badgering the Public Service Board for months to take action on the issue of a Certificate of Public Good for Vermont Yankee, they are getting their wish; but it isn’t working out for them quite as they had envisioned.

Yesterday, PSB Commissioner Elisabeth Miller  wrote to the regional head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to express concern over the

pattern of human errors at the Vernon reactor during the past 15 months.

Miller lists five errors, ranging from failure to remove a plastic cover from a pump before it was installed to inaccurately measuring the dose rate from a shipment of radioactive waste.

Weighing in on the probable outcome of the Public Service Board’s decision regarding continued operation of Vermont Yankee, Governor Shumlin says he is optimistic that the Board will refuse to sign-off on the twenty year extension of VY’s permit to operate.

“I want to shut the plant down on schedule and I’m disappointed that it’s not going to be shut down next week but I’m hoping that we can get a decision from the Public Service Board that will bring that about as quickly as we can. I think it’s in Vermonters best interests – look, we’re not even buying power from the plant anymore.”

If the Public Service Board denies Entergy a Certificate of Public Good and the issue of relicensing is appealed to the US Supreme Court, it is still unclear whether or not Vermont Yankee could continue to operate in defiance of the PSB until a final ruling comes from the Supremes…which would probably mean years more of progressive decrepitude and consequences at the geriatric facility.