(For the benefit of all the frustrated Fairpoint customers and workers in Vermont, I am promoting this letter diary to our Front Page. – promoted by Sue Prent)

An open letter to: Unvalued Sunu,

As a Vermonter, I have read of the dissatisfaction with your services in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the letter to you from my Senators Leahy and Sanders and Representative Welsh and your reply to Vermont Governor Shumlin. The last letter is irrelevant to your failure to provide communications services to the people of Vermont. You are fundamentally failing to provide the public communications services expected of a public utility. Your firm is failing to maintain your distribution lines, to provide adequate server capacity to service the DSL system you installed, to provide backup to the E911 system and to adequately communicate with your “Dear Valued Customers.”  Since the public of the unserved states has no say concerning your internal problems, whether they be management, financial or labor issues, the public can end your services.

Locally, my neighbors who work for Fairpoint will be supported rather than you.

Fairpoint Communication has responsibility to provide the services regardless of the mentioned internal problems. It is obvious that you are attempting to hold the people of Vermont hostage for your corporate benefit. Vermonters are not for sale.

The tree that was leaning on my telephone line because of wet snow was beneath no electric cables. It is now over four weeks since that tree stretched the line such that only the old rotary phone in my house will ring. There is now so much noise on the line that conversations are nearly impossible. I have made one cell telephone call and sent three emails to your residential repair.

Your condescending, computer generated responses to “Dear Valued Customer” are unsatisfactory, scam responses to my lack of service.

A lack of redundance in a E911 system (E is for emergency), is inexcusable. There should have been two redundant servers in an emergency system, one of which could have been serviced while the other was on line. You did not properly supervise whoever was performing the repairs/upgrade and/or you did not have adequate available backup. The behavior of my Internet connection causes me to believe that your server capacity is insufficient to serve your customer base. I have read nothing that you desire to make any amends, whatsoever, to those who were harmed by their lack of ability to obtain assistance when in need. I don’t understand how anyone who thinks as you can act in the name of public service.

Have you ever climbed a telephone pole. Do you know how to splice a telephone cable. Do you have the foggiest idea of what facilities are required for installation of an electronic telephone switch. Do you know anything other than the words of the above activities. Can you repair your telephone? As an engineer, I once directed the installation of a nine hundred phone system in a General Electric Silicones  plant; new lines on the poles, the room for the digital switch, buried connection to the off-site telephone system and safety of the workers installing the system. I am retired and have never been one of your employees. Do you know which end of a screw driver is the handle?

New Hampshire is putting the brakes on a decision on a $13 million contract with FairPoint Communications to provide state government with telephone and Internet service. According to the AP, that FairPoint contract may be taken up in January or that state’s council could choose to reopen the bidding process. Based on what I have read, the bidding should be reopened.

Based on what I have read, the Vermont Public Service Board should immediately undertake determination on how to replace Fairpoint Communications in Vermont. If our only alternative is to create a communications department within our state organization to replace private enterprise, I would support that solution. Banking, health, communications, etc. should all be dedicated public services.

Before you get excited about getting your idea of your infrastructure investment back, let me state that my experience as a town property lister taught me that utilities understate their miles of line and the depreciated value of their facilities. It is my belief that those facilities of yours are worth less than the value on which you have paid taxes.

As an eighty-two year old, who has independently worked as a project engineer for national and international managements, most of which could effectively manage their reasons for existence, I want you out of business in Vermont. Your business is endangering the public welfare. The states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont should file suit against your business; a suit of sufficient magnitude to bankrupt your corporate divisions in those states for failing to provide adequate public services. Furthermore, those states and their citizens should cease paying their bills until all repair and service issues are resolved and adequate communications restored to OUR satisfaction.

Enough of your excuses! You’re a pathetic loser who cannot do the job! Your head is too big!!

Perry Cooper

ps: Wachovia ripped off a trust account of mine by substituting REITs for valuable stocks. Fairpoint is now billing me for unsatisfactory service. If I can avoid them, I will no longer do business with persons of any kind operating from North Carolina.

cc:

Senator Leahy

Senator Sanders

Representative Welsh

Governor Shumlin

Maine Public Utilities Commission

New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission

Vermont Utilities Commission

Federal Communications Commission

(An interesting possibility to toss into the healthcare cost management discussion in Vermont.  Upsides? Downsides?  Let’s talk about it. – promoted by Sue Prent)

Bloomberg News on the Internet, March 7, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/… carries a story titled Cheaper Surgery Sends Lowe’s Flying to The Cleveland Clinic which reports that Lowes Inc. is sending employees to a Cleveland Clinic.

To encourage employees, Lowe’s covers the full cost of surgery, as well as travel and lodging for the worker and a relative. The company health plan won’t cover thousands of dollars of unbundled costs at local hospitals.

As a result, Terry White, president of  BridgeHealth Medical, a Denver based benefit manager said:

In some cases, hospitals will drop their prices as much as 40 percent to guarantee a steady stream of patients they wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is market capitalism at its best if you are not in the local medical industry.

It’s win-win-win for patients, employers and the hospital.

It is certain that there will be immense pressure on the legislatures of Vermont from the medical personnel of the state to prevent this practice. The Vermont legislatures should act to assure that all citizens of the state have the benefit of such practices when the medical standards of out of state hospitals meet the standards of safety for Vermont. Obviously, with the permitted anything-goes attitude of right-wing capitalism in this country, an attempt to horn in on this practice by unqualified, unsafe, opportunistic public and private hospitals will occur.

The practice could be of tremendous value to the average citizen of Vermont if qualified and certified medical competence can be assured. Nothing in this writing is or should be read as criticism of specific medical personnel or institutions in the State of Vermont. The writer has great respect for the medical care he has received in this state.

The same comments applicable to this practice must be enabled by federal statutes. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should immediately begin consideration of certifying hospitals in this regard and modification of pertinent federal statutes.

As report in an article by Alan Levin on Feb 14, 2014 in http://www.bloomberg.com/news/…

“…the Federal Aviation Administration, which since 2007 hasn’t permitted commercial drones in the U.S. while it labors to write rules to allow them.”

Rules? It is simple. ‘Open Season’ should be the rule! Perhaps a bounty on the damn things is in order. Let the American people vote with shotguns whether or not they want the government, corporations or their neighbors looking into their windows of their homes, workplaces, their yards or their automobiles to see what should be private.

Oh! The police, the Defense Department, the NSA, the CIA, the entire government will object. Same vote!

The harm this technology will do to our society is far greater than the benefit to those who would use them.

Perry

Today, I received am email from my friend Marie Limoges that contained this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… The link contains video of the assembly line of the Tesla Motor Co. The emphasis is on how automated with robots is the assembly of these automobiles.

What struck me was the thought of how many workers these machines replaced. This replacement of human beings by automatons has been occurring for the past forty years. Initially, these workers were replaced by less expensive foreign workers. Then, even those jobs were transferred overseas to nations to take advantage of the less rigorous safety, health, retirement and other statutory rules.

To be sure, the robots are designed by higher wage workers. But, those workers replaced within this nation by robots have less beneficial employment, at best. At worst, they have long term unemployment before they must turn to low paying service industry jobs or welfare.

Another friend of mine, Ralph Rosenberg, refers to these manufacturing leftovers as the “new nobility.” The “new nobility” are those who the society must support to do nothing. From where does the money to support these people come?

There are many solutions. One answer might be to revise or eliminate the laws providing for depreciation of production machinery or to require taxation of employers for the depreciation of the employees. Call it what you like. The current system must be changed to provide for those persons who are excess to those needed for production in this country. Either tax breaks for business must be eliminated or those who have income from the businesses must fill the gap.

As Robert Reich blogged on Saturday, January 25, 2014:

At some point, working people, students, and the broad public will have had enough. They will reclaim our economy and our democracy. This has been the central lesson of American history.

Reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait the more likely it will be the latter.

(I have long said that I would be FAR more comfortable with nuclear power as a domestic energy source if the industry were nationalized and placed under the control of the Department of the Navy. Bumped. Bulk of content moved under the jump.   – promoted by kestrel9000)

Thank you Sue Prent for writing about the danger from the Entergy Plant in Vernon known as Vermont Yankee. As I have written before, I assembled reactors at the time General Electric designed the reactor installed at Vernon. At that time, when I read what was proposed for the electric power industry, I knew that trouble was coming. No reactor should be operated for profit!

In those years, I encountered a reactor control drive mechanisms that came accompanied by the vendor verification of quality. A book one-quarter of inch thick accompanied it. Every box of the vendor’s shipping inspection report was initialed. Resistance between the terminals for connection of the reactor control rod position indicators was measured and initialed for a reactor control rod position sensor that was not installed beneath the connector. The heads of the screws holding the connector to the mechanism had holes for wire through them and twisted between them to assure that they could not unscrew on their own.

It seemed that no one at the vendors plant had questioned the presence of a left over sensor prior to shipment. There was one very embarrassed  field representative who had to cut the wires, remove the screws and try to explain the false readings and initials for his employer.

On another occasion, the source range instrumentation for a reactor could not be made to operate according the manual received with it. Russ Medbery, ship’s manager, assigned the task to resolve the issue to me. After three weeks of work in the shipyard’s instrument laboratory, I was able to report to Russ that operation according to the manual was unacceptable. General Electric had contracted with the DuMont Corporation to design this critical instrumentation.

The source range nuclear instrumentation for a power plant measures the initial background radiation in a reactor vessel emitted by an isotopic source of neutrons. That background radiation is the basis of determining when the reactor is approaching criticality. Criticality is when the fission reaction is self-sustaining. Thermal neutrons, those that have slowed from their initial energy as fast neutrons when emitted from an uranium fission, are slightly more likely to sustain the reaction than when immediately emitted. The difference between whether the reaction is controllable depends upon whether slow or fast neutrons are continuing the reaction. If the thermal neutrons sustain the reaction, there is control. If fast, or prompt neutrons sustain the reaction there is no control.

The last paragraph is written so that readers will become a little more knowledgeable about the seriousness of the source range instrumentation. After criticality, other instrumentation is used to control an operating reactor. DuMont went bankrupt during the vendor process and General Electric took over the project. It must have been discovered that the instruments would not meet the lifetime specifications for the radio tubes in use at the time. This was changed by reducing the voltages in the instruments by adjustment of variable resistors in the circuits. The manual was changed accordingly to be in agreement. When I realized that all of the variable resistors were at one end of their adjustment or the other end, I realized that the circuit was not being operated as designed. I reported my findings to Russ and General Electric started shouting that I had no business analyzing their provided instrumentation. Too bad! The buck ended with those of us who had to test and operate the reactor before the Navy would accept the ship.

As stated above, I do not believe profit and nuclear power are compatible. I will go a little further than that. I do not believe that anyone who is unwilling to voluntarily live next to a nuclear reactor with his family has the right to make decisions concerning them, their maintenance or their financing. You really need to put up or shut up about nuclear power. Nuclear power is here to stay! Mankind has never abandoned any source of energy once it has been discovered. Nuclear power will not be an exception. The US Navy has successfully operated reactors to propel its ships since 1954. That said, there is an immense organizational difference between military and commercial operations. I stand that accepted corporate practices are unacceptable for the operation of nuclear reactors.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not satisfactorily regulate nuclear power. It is well established that the majority of the commissioners of that organization have connections and loyalties to the industry that they have been politically appointed to regulate. In my opinion, they are slick, over-paid shills for the nuclear industry, slippery like snot on a glass door knob.

The above are examples of the misrepresentations I encountered by corporations in my nuclear work. If anyone, including David Usher, believes what Entergy or any corporation tells them, they are foolish. Corporations will write and say anything to close a moneymaking deal. Goldman-Sachs is dumping its incestment in a company pimping under-age young women to make money. I believe somebody in the Goldman firm knew that they had peddled financial incest to a blind trust in the name of Ann Romney, wife of Republican U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Your local ‘trust’ (sic) company has sold mortgages to firms that have sold collections of them for investment. There are now property mortgages in the US which multiple investment instruments claim to own. Who owns yours? The mortgage market is rife with outright fraud. Your interest counts for nothing with corporations. Bloomberg’s financial news carried an article, today, in which someone associated with finance states, bluntly, that nobody puts the customer ahead of his own interests. That is true! Do not ever believe what a corporation tells you.

Do not allow any Entergy or any corporation to control your personal future or that of the State of Vermont!!!!

April 2, 2012

PS To the Editor, the term ‘financial incestment’ was originally a typo. Since, it fits my opinion of the financial industry, I did not correct it.

This is a letter that I wrote to the editor of the St. Albans Messenger to respond to the pleas of workers at the Vernon, Vermont nuclear power plant that their jobs be saved. It has been amended to read more specifically and emphatically.

On the subject of the Nuclear Plant in Vernon, Vermont

There has recently been a spate of letters to the editor of this paper written by employees of Entergy‛s nuclear electricity generating plant in Vernon. It is obvious to me that the Entergy Corporation has a public relations campaign involved in having its workers write letters to save their jobs.

The readers of this paper need some perspective on this subject.

I first assembled a nuclear reactor in 1958, nine months after I graduated from Columbia University. This was about four years after the first reactor to produce nuclear power became operational. At the time, there were two designs by Westinghouse and one design by General Electric in operation. That first reactor I assembled was a prototype of General Electric‛s second design.

Russ Medbery, the West Milton, NY, site construction manager for the project called Jim Day and I into his office. He said he had chosen the two of us to assemble the reactor. After handing us the drawings of the reactor, he said that if we needed any help, we should contact him. No procedures had been written for that reactor. We wrote them. We talked with the designers. We visited the manufacturers of the control drives. We handled the fuel.

Instead of sealing the reactor before filling it with the moderating water, we lowered the fuel into the water while the physicist that designed the reactor core monitored its reactivity. Admiral Richover interviewed me, standing on top of the reactor, while we were inserting a fuel element. The tradespeople I was direct were nervous about what was happening under their feet. The semester  course in reactor engineering that I had passed at Columbia let me understand the inverse  reactivity chart he was plotting. If one divided by the reactivity he was measuring reached zero, BOOM! You would not be reading this. Instead, I was able to reassure the workers that they were safe.

Following that assembly, I assembled two more reactors of that design in a submarine and tested the two of them, operating together. I then assembled three submarine reactors of Westinghouse‛s third design and one reactor of Combustion Engineering design. There was a twelve month period in which I assembled four reactors. I trained a Rolls Royce engineer who returned to England to direct the assembly of that nation‛s first submarine reactor. Later, I was senior Refueling Reactor for a reactor of Westinghouse‛s second design. I trained members of the English Admiralty and the contracted engineers in reactor refueling techniques.

Westinghouse leased my services from the Electric Boat Corporation to disassemble a steam generator removed from the reactor plant of the prototype reactor for the USS Nautilus. It was the first reactor to produce useable power. The location was also downwind from nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. That testing sometimes resulted in five milli-Roentgen per hour background levels all over Idaho. Where I worked was also over-the-horizon from an experimental nuclear airplane engine. The catch phase among nuclear workers was: “Not over my house.” Down the road from where I worked was an underground plant that dissolved spent reactor fuel to recover useable isotopes from the fission products. I have watched work being done with spent fuel assemblies not more than ten feet away from me, through a leaded glass window.

The steam generator disassembly work was performed in a spent fuel facility. I was able to enter the pool rooms, turn off the lights and witness the Cerenkov radiation from the fuel. Cerenkov radiation around the radioactive fuel emits blue light. The disassembly involved work in eight Roentgen per hour radiations fields. Since it was my engineering practice to never ask a workman to perform work that I would not do and to do the work myself if I could do it faster and receive less radiation than he would, I installed plastic plugs in the steam generator tubes myself. A film badge and dosimeter recorders on my right wrist received one Roentgen. My whole body exposure was within limits.

Nuclear power can be worked with. I am almost seventy-nine and have voluntarily done far more damage to my bodily health than radiation did. When Westinghouse and General Electric began marketing their nuclear skills to the power generation industry as a turn-key operation, around 1963 or 1964, I was appalled. Nuclear reactors are horribly dangerous. They are not automobiles that you can safely run after being handed the key. Unfortunately, business people love risk, especially when they live far from it and it makes money. All things are less important to them than money, including other people.

In my opinion, it is absolutely unforgivable to operate a nuclear plant with a pipe that you do not know is there, that you cannot explain. If radioactive fluid is entering a pipe, there is at least one end to the pipe that someone should have asked about. It is totally, absolutely irresponsible to build a nuclear plant, much less five of them, where it is known that a tectonic plate is converging in order past under another tectonic plate, as at Fukushima, Japan. It is even more irresponsible, if that is possible, to ignore stone markers in the hills that designate the extreme heights reached by tsunamis from past tectonic slippages, as was done at Fukushima.

That brings us back to the Windsor, Vermont plant. I have always believed that the people responsible for a nuclear reactor should live with the beast as do the submariners that live underwater in a metal tube with a reactor, at nearly inconceivable water pressure. I have worked with people who died when their submarine sank. I have listened to the transmissions between a tender and a sinking submarine. For the love of money, bean counters and businessmen will take all kinds of risks with other peoples lives.

Allowed to, Entergy would operate the Vernon plan until it fails financially. They will then declare bankruptcy and leave the mess to someone else, if they can. You can be certain that the cost to clean up the mess is more than they plan to spend.

In conclusion, I am truly sorry that the workers at the Vernon Plant will lose their jobs if the plant closes. Believe me when I say that I hope you will find work at an adequate wage, even if less than you make today. I did not knowingly take chances that I could avoid when working with reactors. One worker who gave me excuses for why he could not perform his job was off the job, regardless of the consequences to his personal life. My wife, child and I lived closer to the reactor than his wife, children and he did. If the workers pleading for their jobs at the Vernon plant must be sacrificed for the safety of the rest of us, so be it. I would rather that you lose your job than live with a reactor managed by an absentee corporation that cares only for money.

Witchcat

The United State Government recently killed an American citizen affiliated with al Qaeda named Awlaki. The decision to destroy this United States citizen was made by a secret outlaw committee, with changing secret membership, operating with secret rules and secret justifications, with no due process and fuzzy oversight by the President of the United States. The school systems of the United States should immediately stop teaching our children that this country is a democracy.

An article published by Reuters, ” Secret panel can put Americans on “kill list,” written by Mark Hosenball and published September 5, 2011 contains the details about its title. The following are quotations are excerpted from that article, http://www.reuters.com/article…

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy.

Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.

Ruppersberger said.

The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law,”

Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.

The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.

…intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial.

You can be killed without even knowing who you have offended. We have a non-democracy in which we must trust the politicians, bureaucrats, military and their underlings who anonymously lie to us, regularly.  If we have no right to know when or how we will be killed and if all we can trust is the aggressive and the arrogant, the Constitution of the United States is gone.

As a United States Border Patrol agent once said to me:

“It does not matter how you vote.”

This was a reply to this author when I said I voted while discussing Border Patrol behavior about an incident that did not involve me in any way.  How revealing! This appears to sum the attitude of the Washington government.  Washington does not give a dam about us unless we have wealth.

If you oppose the plans of the aggressive and arrogant for your country, could you be put on the list? There are no rules. Some fat capitalist, or commissar, or anyone could buy the presidency and have you killed, anonymously. This is not democracy. It certainly gives others reason to hate and destroy us.

Witchcat

The goons and lawyers of Syria, Greece. New York City and elsewhere know very well which side of their bread has butter on it. It is the side of the wealthy and their lawyers. The goons do not hang out with the people on the street. The hoi polloi of the street do not have the wherewithal to pay the salaries, medical benefits and retirements of the goons. No one should be surprised by what is happening.

The wealthy and their lawyers write the laws for their own benefit. If they write what the people want, they write so many conditions and loopholes that the laws are without meaning for themselves. All but a few judges are lawyers. Their loyalty is to those who pay them and, secondly, to their lawyer peers. The churches have inputs to many laws. The majority of their parishioners do not live according to the core principles of their prophets. The religiously powerful are usually hypocrites.

Marx was right. The wealthy want feudalism and sometimes they have it, for a while. This class war in which the earth is engaged has continued for all of time. It is called revolution because it goes round and round. No one should be surprised at the fight that is taking place.

This time, the fight appears to be global.  In our modern times, it was the hippies of the nineteen-sixties who said that people should think locally and act globally. It was not long before the wealthy understood the truth of the second word, for themselves, although they are very seldom able to think and act locally. As soon as a businessman opens a second store, local begins to lose meaning. The class war has now become global, not local to or within individual countries.

This class conflict could end peacefully but history generally records that the peaceful endings are temporary. The children and grandchildren of the wealthy crawl back under the tent flaps of society to repeat the conflict. Violent endings to this conflict last longer but are horrendous to societies.

Human nature being what it is, it is not likely that either ending will close the conflict. Still, the most desirable ending to the current class war will be capitulation by the wealthy and their return to being one of the people from which they aggressively rose. As my friend, Skeeter, once said to me, the wealthy are like kites, it is constantly necessary to pull them down.

Like it or not, we are all mongrels.

witchcat

Statements contained in a January 21, 2010 report by WCAX about Entergy's Vernon Nuclear Plant raised so many disconnections surrounding the nuclear power issue that I am drawn to comment, as follows:

Vermont Yankee officials and federal regulators are quoted saying the tritium leak at the plant is not a reason for public concern.”

The public is concerned! The public should be concerned. What has occurred is a lack of attention on the part of capitalist, market oriented, Vermont Yankee officials.

Federal regulators are obviously more concerned with covering their butts than addressing public concerns. Yankee officials care for their bottom line, not the public.

Public officials should have sufficient experience to comprehend the current extent of corporate corruption of public due process.

Public concern must be dissuaded rather than declared not.

What has occurred is exactly what I feared about commercial nuclear power when Westinghouse and General Electric first began promoting “turn-key,” commercial, nuclear powered electrical generating power plants, in the mid-1960s.

At the time, I had assembled six of those firms first nuclear reactors for submarines and knew that marketing people should have nothing to do with nuclear power. Success in the marketing profession is too seldom the result of honesty and admitted understanding of what is being sold.

Nuclear power plants, managed by persons who are “from away,” who are not living the real-time of operation, maintenance and safety of such a plant, are unobservant of plant conditions. They will not order inspection of cooling towers and trenches when it will cost them profits to discover maintenance issues the cost of which they would like to avoid.

“Yankee officials revealed Wednesday that the radioactive isotope Tritium was found in standing water inside a concrete tunnel at the plant. The tunnel is the conduit for pipes that carry radioactive waste to the plant's waste processing facility.”

Why did Yankee officials not know about it? Why did they not presume a trench carrying radioactive waste might have loose radioactive materials and inspect it regularly. Why are they not inspecting the entire plant regularly to learn if the plant has issues? Did they hide the facts? Or did they not look because the more they and the public do not know about what might cost them, the better? Everyone understands 'bean counter' logic and money draws lawyers to cover bean counters' asses like a dead body draws maggot flies.

“Yankee officials say the standing water should not be in the tunnel but it is not a cause for public alarm.”

No shit! What else would anyone expect them to say? If there is anyone breathing who believes what corporate officials say to the public, they are either idiots or sycophants.

Yankee officials stated this the tritium containing water that is not out in the environment. It is contained in a locked room within the plant.

Where did they get the water that does not evaporate? Since when does a lock on a door contain vapors?

“It's a below-grade room within the plant in a confined space,” said Neil Sheehan of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

It is not in a confined space if it reached radiological test wells, Below grade did not keep it out of the test wells. Sorry, Sheehan, you would not have made the grade with Admiral Rickover.

Neil Sheehan of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also is quoted as saying that the standing water was not expected to be found there in the trench.

What a terrible statement! Is it OK if persons who manage Vernon do not slow down when driving through your neighborhood and kill a two-year old girl because they did not expect the child to run from behind a parked car? The key to successfully working with power, is to always try to anticipate the unexpected.

“One positive that could come out of this is that this helps them trace back the source of any groundwater contamination. That would be a very good thing.”

The best example of 'spin' that I have read. Sheehan should work on Wall Street. Can he turn feces into honey?

“So far the amount of tritium found in groundwater outside the plant is below federal reporting standards. Sheehan says it's a mere fraction of the amount found in an illuminated Exit sign.”

Most illuminating bulbs, these days, must be discarded as waste hazardous to human health.

Gov. Jim Douglas, R-Vermont, was quoted as saying the state health department is monitoring the situation.

Yup! That covers his ass.

“This is a test well that has been placed near the nuclear plant. So the health department, I have complete confidence in, and I'm sure they'll let the people of Vermont or anyone else know if there's a reason for a public health concern,” Douglas said.”

Jim Douglas will say anything to benefit a corporation.

“Of greater concern to the governor is the revelation last week that Yankee officials had made misstatements to state regulators about the very existence of these underground pipes.”

Being out of the loop sucks.

“Douglas says he's still waiting to hear back from company executives with an explanation. But even though his trust in the company has been shaken, Douglas says he still supports relicensing the plant.”

Douglas can be bought much too cheaply to be a governor!

Now!

Nuclear Power should not be a commercial enterprise!

Public officials must learn to talk about the details of the nuclear process if they desire to educate the public and dispel its fears.

Nuclear reactors are not black magic. While nuclear reactors have a larger scale, they essentially have fewer moving parts than an automobile engine.

The Vernon plant should not be re-licensed. It should be taken out of service. Vernon is not the place to perform destructive testing of how long the first GE commercial nuclear power plant design will last. Only gamblers to take chances like that.

Profit and nuclear power do not mix!

Profit and power do not mix!

If Vermont is unable to operate a nuclear plant to produce the power it needs, with its own citizens, at the risk of its own citizens, it should turn off its lights and snow-making.

I recommend that a Public Power Commission be established to replace the Vernon plant with a new reactor in order to take advantage of extremely valuable tradesmen, permits, procedures and site improvements. The commission should also replace the statewide corporate production and distribution of power.

A functioning public power infrastructure is more important than private profits.

Whether overly paranoid or cowardly people like it or not, nuclear power is here to stay. The oppositions to nuclear weaponry espoused by the pickets whose lines I crossed when building early nuclear reactors in submarines, 53 years ago, were appreciated. I would remind you that as a result of the efforts many people, war between the Soviet Union and the United States did not happen.

It was unthinkable! Today, persons opposed to nuclear energy plants cause me to think of a person screaming 'Don't do it! Don't do it!' at the first human attempting to stand on his or her hind legs. They are losers!

Nuclear power is here! We must learn to operate it with control!

As much as we cannot environmentally sustain the standard of living to which the citizens of the United States have become accustomed, if this nation fails to learn to control nuclear power, that will put our country behind the rest of the nations of the world, economically.

Witchcat

A very fundamental misunderstanding concerning the heat balance of Planet Earth needs attention. It concerns solar power.

Increasing the energy captured from the sun heats the earth. To maintain a relatively even temperature, it is necessary that the earth radiate an equal amount of energy, to the universe. The temperature of the earth is rising because chemicals released by the production of energy and released into the atmosphere are interfering with this radiation to space. For practical purposes, the sun has provided all but a relatively insignificant portion of the energy received and stored.

Petroleum, hydro, nuclear, wind, tidal, and wave energy are forms of energy received from the past and stored that are available for use without heating the earth provided that what is released is returned to storage. Otherwise, the energy released must be radiated to space to prevent heating of the earth and a diminishment of the earth’s stored energy. This applies to all of the energy released to produce devices needed to capture more of the suns energy,

Perry Cooper

2159 Witchcat Road

Enosburg Falls, Vermont 05450