Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King pointed the way.  But he didn’t draw us a map.  Guess he gave us more credit for smarts.  Well, it’s getting this close to too late now.

Let’s see what our fearless leader is up to on this great anniversary day:

“Oh my God, I must say…This Syrian thing is making me completely mental…Have you located Pat Sajak yet?…Awh, give me a break…I need help here…I need Pat…And Vana…Putin is going completely mental too…He’s threatening to bomb the Saudis…And they have all the vowels…Where’s my triangle?…Did one of you Secret Service go mental and take my triangle?…YES!…Oh that’s it!…Decent!…Totally…I’ll triangulate the Russians…That would be so totally decent…And then spin the big wheel…Yes!…Oh, I figured it out all by myself…Cancel that call to Pat…I must say, this being President is not so wicked hard…But it’s like totally and completely mental…I must say…”

But don’t worry.  Be happy.  Didn’t Obama write that song?  Back when he was Rasta?  Was that before or after he was Bill Cosby?  And had that TV show?  And did Jello commercials?  I can’t remember.  I think I’m going completely mental.  Where’s those buttons?  Who took my buttons for the nuclear missiles?  Give me a break…

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.

With Entergy announcing an end-date for Vermont Yankee, we have only a moment to shout “hurray” before returning to the ugly reality of decommissioning, and the likelihood that Entergy cannot be counted on to foot the bill.

As Arnie Gundersen has been telling us for years, there isn’t enough money in the decommissioning kitty to do the job.

Even though Entergy has satisfied the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s minimum requirement for the decommissioning fund, that is far from the end of the story.

One can safely posit that, given the Commission’s adopted mission as “industry cheerleader,” the $566-million minimum established by the NRC is a profoundly conservative figure which assumes an ongoing operation generating new revenues and allowing interest to build over a twenty-year span.  

After all, didn’t the NRC just re-up VY for another twenty years?  That must make it so!

Even without incident

Gundersen believes the cleanup will cost $250 million more than what’s in there now.

And if the worst should happen?  (from Seven Days)

Based on Gundersen’s experience decommissioning of other nukes around the country, he recommends that Vermont regulators remain diligent watching for underground leaks of radioactive material, including cesium, cobalt and strontium which are “incredibly difficult to detect from above.”

Such a leak at Connecticut Yankee, he notes, raised the cleanup costs by about $1 billion.

Ken PIcard of Seven Days quotes Arnie as saying,

“Let’s hope the stock market doesn’t collapse again,”

Let us, indeed; but even without a financial collapse, nuclear’s recently ascendant star appears to be on the wane, owing to market forces and loss of consumer confidence.  

Entergy, with its “slightly used” fleet of leaky, creaky reactors is among the most vulnerable.

This is the gang who can’t shoot straight.  Remember last year’s Superbowl blackout, courtesy of Entergy?  And how about the worker who was recently killed at Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear Power Plant?

But I need not go on.  Have a listen to Arnie’s new podcast on the Fairewinds Energy Education website.  

While you’re at it, how about hitting that “donate” button, for all the advocacy work that remains ahead in order to ensure our safety from nuclear folly?

They won the ruling against the The People of Vermont, that’s why.

Entergy is facing fights in New York and California regarding their nuke plants in those states, with those states legislatures eager to do something about these ancient plants being run past their designed lifespan. Vermont was first and Entergy was eager to fight this battle here simply because Vermont is a much cheaper battle ground for them than NY or CA.

Now, with the circuit court ruling on their side – that anyone anywhere who even whispers the the word ‘safety’ irrevocably taints the law – Entergy is girded for battle against the tougher and more expensive NY and CA legislatures.

Vermont Yankee was just a bargaining chip in their fight against We, The People. Now that they’ve won against Vermont and pre-empted New York and California, VY is merely a spent delivery vehicle to be discarded.

We were all just pawns in their game.

(My darling wife is responsible for this concept, I am just the delivery vehicle…)

I think it was Arnie Gundersen!

The whistler blower the nuclear industry loves to hate, Fairewinds Energy Education’s engineer Arnie Gundersen gets it right again.

Arnie correctly predicted that Entergy would refuse to spend the money needed to replace ENVY’s worn-out steam condenser.

http://www.fairewinds.com

This announcement to close the Vernon reactor deflects attention from ENVY’s radiation monitors going off again. The “faulty monitors” giving high radiation signals in June and July were replaced, and the new monitors are signaling high doses in August.

http://digital.vpr.net/post/ya…

Entergy wants to wait sixty years before the cleanup gets going in earnest, using the NRC approved “Safstor” plan to leave the mess for people not yet living.

And Vernon will be a nuclear waste dump, forever.

The Wall Street Journal:

Entergy Corporation (NYSE: ETR) today said it plans to close and decommission its Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt. The station is expected to cease power production after its current fuel cycle and move to safe shutdown in the fourth quarter of 2014.

More to come, no doubt.

UPDATE: From PR Newswire (aka, the news-flaks at Entergy)

“This was an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us,” said Leo Denault, Entergy’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Vermont Yankee has an immensely talented, dedicated and loyal workforce, and a solid base of support among many in the community. We recognize that closing the plant on this schedule was not the outcome they had hoped for, but we have reluctantly concluded that it is the appropriate action for us to take under the circumstances.”

The decision to close Vermont Yankee in 2014 was based on a number of financial factors, including:

• A natural gas market that has undergone a transformational shift in supply due to the impacts of shale gas, resulting in sustained low natural gas prices and wholesale energy prices.
• A high cost structure for this single unit plant. Since 2002, the company has invested more than $400 million in the safe and reliable operation of the facility. In addition, the financial impact of cumulative regulation is especially challenging to a small plant in these market conditions.
• Wholesale market design flaws that continue to result in artificially low energy and capacity prices in the region, and do not provide adequate compensation to merchant nuclear plants for the fuel diversity benefits they provide.

Making the decision now and operating through the fourth quarter of 2014 allows time to duly and properly plan for a safe and orderly shutdown and prepare filings with the NRC regarding shutdown and decommissioning. Entergy will establish a decommissioning planning organization responsible for planning and executing the safe and efficient decommissioning of the facility. Once the plant is shut down, workers will de-fuel the reactor and place the plant into SAFSTOR, a process whereby a nuclear facility is placed and maintained in a condition that allows it to be safely secured, monitored and stored.”

…

Entergy plans to recognize an after-tax impairment charge of approximately $181 million in the third quarter of 2013 related to the decision to shut down the plant at the end of this current operating cycle. In addition to this initial charge, Entergy expects to recognize charges totaling approximately $55 to $60 million associated with future severance and employee retention costs through the end of next year. These charges will be classified as special items, and therefore, excluded from operational results.

Kudos to the VNRC for taking a stand against the F-35 basing in South Burlington.  They have sent a letter to Mayor Weinberger and the City Council to that effect.

It’s tough to do, given our usually reliable DC delegation’s unanimous support for the siting;  but it is the right thing to do.

To their credit, the folks at the VNRC took a long considered look at the proposal before taking that position; and, in their statement,  they skipped the endless debate over sound-levels and went straight to the heart of the matter: sustainable communities, and what we must sometimes be prepared to do to protect them.  

We don’t need a fly-over to appreciate the impact of abandoned houses, where vandalism is the only sign of life.

Sometimes we forget that sustainable communities are natural systems as surely as those of fish, wildlife and the environmental building blocks that the VNRC is most often called upon to defend.

The VNRC argument focusses on the impact on affordable housing in the area and, in so doing, directs attention to the fundamental needs of the least among us.

Chittenden county can ill afford to sacrifice affordable housing; and those who would present the matter as a choice between job creation/job retention and affordable housing are playing at the same nasty game as the governor when he suggested raiding the earned income tax credit in order to fund early childhood education.

There are other options.  There are always other options.  Often they involve sacrifices by those who can most afford to make them but have the greatest opportunity to avoid the sacrifice.

Let’s see what you’ve got up the other sleeve, Gentlemen.

Only the ironically impaired will read about Walmart’s latest promotion without a smirk.

Walmart, we are told, is pushing “made in America” as its new theme.

Take shoes, for instance; in 1960, the U.S made 98% of the shoes sold in this country.  As of 2009, we were buying more than 90%  of footwear from overseas.

I think we can safely assume that the small amount of U.S.-made footwear that is sold in America is mostly stocked by medium to higher priced stores. Walmart doesn’t contribute much if anything to the less than 10% of footwear currently being sourced, and is unlikely to make a change in that department.

Even if the next ten largest retailers of shoes in America made a commitment to match Walmart’s U.S. representation in the shoe department, that still would barely move the domestic consumption needle on shoes and would certainly not bring shoe manufacturing back to the U.S.

If their commitment is to sourcing 1% of their products from U.S. manufacturers, isn’t it fairly safe to say that they could satisfy this figure almost entirely with food products?  In fact, I would venture to guess that Walmart is already satisfying the requirements of this very, very low bar.

So nothing ventured, nothing lost.  Meanwhile Walmart gets some warm and fuzzies from the mathmatically challenged press and then has the opportunity to double-down  on their rationale for buying “foreign” when, inevitably, it is more convenient to abandon the “made in USA” meme for “always low prices.”  

Nothing really changes about the business model, just the marketing strategy.

Walmart broke it, and Walmart ain’t gonna fix it.

Labor Day 2013

On Labor Day we celebrate those who work — as opposed to those who inherit family wealth and those whose financial investments work so they don’t have to. Many workers who deserve to be honored on this special day have come from across the border. In a global economy, workers who strive for justice in their own country must, by necessity, unite with workers around the world.

Workers from across the border, as well as native born workers, often experience hostility. They work on farms and in factories. They empty bed pans in nursing homes. They scrub toilets and make beds in the hotel industry. They work in retail outlets. They work in the construction industry as carpenters and roofers. They educate our children. They care for our elders. They have earned our respect and gratitude.  They deserve to be honored on Labor Day, and every day.

Below are typical statements made by bosses to their employees — workers who struggle for survival on the dark side of Capitalism.

1. Look, it doesn’t matter if the fumes are making you sick. OSHA says everything is OK.

2. I already told you that you couldn’t have the morning off. Your Father’s funeral can wait till the weekend.

3. Union, did I just hear somebody say, “Union?” Fire that damn Commie !

4. You want a raise… The government says I don’t have to give you a raise.

5. If you want health insurance, move to Costa Rica. This is the USA. Love it, or leave it. Besides, we don’t have any sick people here. We fire them when they get sick.

6. You say you want paid maternity leave. If the corporation wanted you to have a baby we would have issued you one.

7. What’s the big deal – it’s just asbestos.

8. Hey kid, stop crying and pick those tomatoes faster. You can celebrate your 8th birthday tonight when you get back to your camper.

9. Next time that you want to go to the bathroom, ask for permission first. That’s the rule.

10. You say that the school called and told you that your child was just injured on the playground and needs to go to the hospital. Who gave you permission to use the phone? Get back to work.

11. A little bit of ionizing radiation never hurt anybody.

12. Think of it as an adventure. Nobody dies from black lung anymore.

13. You say you want a week of paid vacation — move to France, this is America.

14. Hell no, you can’t leave. Wait till your shift is over. I don’t care if your labor pains are just 3 minutes apart.

Rosemarie Jackowski

Algae blooms choking St. Albans Bay are only a part of the bad news for water quality in Franklin County and Vermont as a whole.

Both the City and the Town of St. Albans are actively pursuing ambitious new development projects.  In so doing, they may be contributing significantly to the ill health of the Bay.

One of the principle developments in the Town,  a vast new  Walmart store and parking lot,  involves disturbance of a large tract of agricultural soil from which quantities of residual fertilizer have no doubt been “liberated” to find their way downstream.   Even when developers satisfy the letter of the law with regard to controlling run-off from construction sites, there is no such thing as “zero contributions.”

Local wisdom holds that we can build, build, build our way out of our economic troubles; and that parking places somehow equate to job creation (a principle which I am sure has never been embraced by serious economists.)  

Little is ever said about the impact of all this development pressure on our most valuable natural resource, since money has a powerful megaphone and water just burbles unobtrusively along.

Now, the honest effort by those who would act to protect the Bay has been dealt another serious  blow. A program of significant value in the fight against lake decline has come to a halt.  

Over town objections, flow gages were installed a couple of years ago in order to monitor the rate at which water (and therefore, the pollutants carried in that water) is entering the lake and from what sources.

The Town initially objected because they were concerned that accepting the monitoring meant some sort of obligation on their part….like, for instance, to do something about the phosphorus levels?  

Now the gages will cease to operate at the end of September, largely due to government cutbacks.  Not only will those gages be defunded, but so will a gage installed twenty years ago to monitor flow at the mouth of the Missisquoi River in Swanton. The Missisquoi is singularly important to the health of the entire Lake Champlain basin.

Flow data gleaned from the gages is paired with other data analyzing contaminant levels, so that effective policies can be developed to improve the overall vitality of our Lake.

As with all such efforts there are real economic benefits associated with a cleaner environment, but that is little appreciated by many officials, who live from election cycle to election cycle, concentrating on short term economics alone.

Unfortunately, I cannot link to the outstanding story filed in the Messenger by Michelle Monroe, which carries an informative history of monitoring efforts and the rise and fall of the program under a cloud of politics.

Vermont’s Clean & Clear played a significant role in securing the placement of the gages, but that effort was not without its local challenges.

Suffice it to say that when the Tea Party rails against earmarks, it is this sort of program that often gets the axe. Without a Leahy sponsored earmark, which initially required the U.S. Geological Services to pay for the gages, they very likely never would have been installed and we would not have the benefit of data that they have already collected.

Once that earmark had been pulled in 2010, the U.S.G.S. continued to pay for half of the monitoring, and the Lake Champlain Basin Program, using funds from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission paid for the rest. They also helped to support monitoring of some locations in New York State.

It appears that GLFC is no longer able to make that contribution, so all the of the monitoring will have to end.

And that’s a shame, because the health of the Lake was never in greater jeopardy than it is now, with development pressures and climate change worsening an already critical situation.

Now that our annual Lake Champlain Toxic Algae Festival is off to a rip-roaring start, I thought it was time to explore a question that’s been percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. The question that’s the title of this diary.

It’s almost an article of faith around these parts: Vermont has a strong devotion to the environment. We feel closely connected with nature, and are dedicated to preserving it whenever and however we can. On environmental issues, we set an example that others should follow.

Well, in the words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.”

Sure, there’s some truth in that comforting self-image — but there’s also a whole lot of horse hockey. And that comfy self-satisfaction prevents us from truly examining our environmental performance and evaluating the choices we face.

It’s a given that Vermont is a relatively green, natural place with above-average environmental quality. But that’s mostly due to two factors that have nothing to do with our inherent virtue as a people, or our diligent stewardship of the land:

— A small population, and

— A relative lack of extractable resources.

It’s easy to be environmentally friendly when your numbers are small. Heck, there’ve been people on Earth for two and a half million (or six thousand, as you prefer) years now, and we didn’t begin to f*ck up the atmosphere until the last two hundred or so. Here in Vermont, we can let our unfiltered woodstoves belch fumes all winter long, flout clean-water standards, drive trucks and SUVs and four-wheel drive vehicles* all over the place, and allow unregulated junkyards to flourish, and it hardly makes a dent on the Green Mountain State. (Well, except for the water part; but more on that later.)

*I’ve lived here for seven winters, and I can count on my fingers the number of days I wished I had four-wheel drive. Overall, I’d rather have two-wheel drive and get two or three more miles to the gallon. Sure, there are those who really do need FWD, but for most of us, a Subaru is a badge of Vermontiness rather than a necessity of life.

And it’s easy to be green when you don’t have significant deposits of coal, oil, natural gas, iron ore, or precious minerals to exploit. (Our much-touted fracking ban is essentially an empty gesture, since we don’t have any known reserves of gas and nobody’s even looking.) If our Appalachians were as loaded with coal as West Virginia’s, do you think we could have spurned the financial rewards of strip mining? I’d like to think so, but the truth is, we’ve never had to make that choice.

Of course, we do have much to be proud of.  

One great example: coming from a state with no “current use” protection for landowners, I can say that Act 250 is a terrific thing, and has done a lot to rein in development. Of course, our lack of population has done even more; outside of Chittenden County, there’s just not much of a market for suburban sprawl.

Indeed, our low population has allowed us to be disturbingly lax on many environmental issues. To name a few:

— As the annual algae blooms can attest, we have a lousy track record on water quality. We’re still awaiting word from the EPA on what Vermont has to do to catch up with the Clean Water Act; that’s likely to be an expensive process, and nobody seems to have the political will to take it on.

Our sewage and stormwater systems are outdated and frequently overflow, sending untreated waste into our rivers and streams. And, as Seven Days’ Ken Picard recently reported, Vermont has a laughably weak system for reporting overflows. What’s worse, there is no real system for tracking the health impacts of overflows:

State toxicologist Sarah Vose says that testing for E. coli, considered a “fecal indicator bacteria,” only occurs at managed beaches and swimming areas, such as Burlington’s North Beach and Oakledge Park. When the public swims, boats or fishes at other locations, she says, they do so at their own risk.

Yep, the ol’ swimmin’ hole may actually be an ol’ shithole.

— Some people are very concerned about emissions from biomass plants (which are held to very strict air-quality standards), but they seem completely unbothered by Vermont’s unregulated woodstoves. According to the ANR, between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Vermont households use wood for some or all of their heating. That’s a lot of smoke.

In most areas of the country, woodburning from fireplaces and woodstoves is the largest source of particulate matter air pollution (PM) generated by residential sources. In some localities, fireplaces and woodstoves have been identified as the source of 80% or more of all ambient particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) during the winter months.

Well, I guess particulate matter is acceptable, as long as it’s generated The Vermont Way.

Now, I’m not saying we should abandon wood heat. I’m just saying that it’s one of our many environmental blind spots.

— We have an appalling record on junkyards. Indeed, until the year 2010 — three years ago! — auto junkyards were essentially unregulated. Before then, the responsible agency was the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had no staff with environmental training and regulated entirely on the basis of appearance. Which meant, as long as you had a high fence along the roadside, you were A-OK with the state of Vermont.

And since the DMV had no resources to enforce its piddling rules, it unilaterally decided, quite a while ago, to only regulate junkyards along state highways. There’s a junkyard right in Montpelier, about a half mile from its picture-book downtown, that has never been effectively regulated. The soil and groundwater has never been tested. It’s located a few hundred feet from the Winooski River. And nobody cares.

— And then there’s our response to climate change. We’ve established some very progressive goals on renewable energy — which is the easy part. Attaining them is the real challenge. This year, our political leaders basically punted on energy efficiency, which is one of the keys to limiting greenouse gas emissions.

In terms of implementing the transition to renewables, even at this early stage we’re getting significant blowback — not only from pro-business groups, but from portions of the environmental community who fear change above everything, and who seem to hold the magical belief that if we don’t change, the climate will respect our borders and leave us untouched.

The unspoken guiding principle seems to be this: If it’s old, traditional, familiar, or small, it’s good (or at least acceptable). If it’s new, shiny, different, or (gasp!) corporate, it’s bad and we need to resist it.

And there’s where our self-satisfaction becomes counterproductive. Not everything old, traditional, familiar or small is good; not everything new, shiny, different, or even corporate is bad.

Vermont needs to take off those Green-tinted glasses and take a clear-eyed look at itself. In many ways, it needs to stay the same. In some important ways, though, it needs to change, if it’s going to be the environmental bellwether of our collective imagination.