Vermont Yankee: Out of the Fission and Into the Fire?

- by Ann Dar­ling, The Safe and Green Campaign

The Ver­mont Yan­kee nuclear pow­er sta­tion in south­east­ern Ver­mont will close in Decem­ber of this year after oper­at­ing for over 40 years. The own­er, Enter­gy Nuclear, is based in New Orleans and is the sec­ond largest nuclear pow­er com­pa­ny in the U.S.

As a mem­ber of the Safe and Green Cam­paign, which is made up of activists who live close to the nuke and whose home­land is the most in harm’s way, I have wit­nessed some pret­ty dirty tac­tics to keep this par­tic­u­lar form of dirty ener­gy going. The litany of prob­lems and deceit seemed nev­er to end – a trans­former fire, rot­ted cool­ing tow­ers flood­ing the site with water, tri­tium leaks, lies under oath, mul­ti­ple law­suits, reg­u­la­to­ry com­plic­i­ty and deaf­ness, the silenc­ing of the Ver­mont leg­is­la­ture, state inac­tion on the heat­ing of the Con­necti­cut Riv­er, bar­gain­ing in back rooms with the Gov­er­nor to make a deal with an acknowl­edged dev­il (Enter­gy), the chal­lenge to democ­ra­cy embod­ied in fed­er­al law that says only “experts” can under­stand or address nuclear safe­ty issues. And that’s not all, by far.

But now Ver­mont Yan­kee is clos­ing. Music to my ears? Well, for a few moments we cel­e­brat­ed. We cel­e­brat­ed our role in sup­port­ing the State of Ver­mont to enact leg­is­la­tion to take some con­trol back for the state, and in the ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful law­suit between Enter­gy and Ver­mont. We cel­e­brat­ed the orga­niz­ing of many mean­ing­ful and fun actions that mobi­lized thou­sands. We cel­e­brat­ed not hav­ing to go to any more Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion hear­ings that just left us angry and incred­u­lous (I have to admit I enjoyed scold­ing the young NRC staffer about not clean­ing up after him­self and leav­ing all the radioac­tive waste in an incred­i­bly vul­ner­a­ble pool of water.)

Yan­kee said it closed because it was no longer prof­itable to oper­ate due to the cheap cost of nat­ur­al gas. OK, I can accept that. And I also know that the mil­lions of dol­lars Enter­gy had to spend on law­suits and secu­ri­ty, and the bad press they got, also played an impor­tant role that we are very proud of.

But now back to real­i­ty. Yan­kee has been a large employ­er in our rur­al area, and it has paid very high salaries and sup­port­ed lots of local non-prof­its. Its clos­ing will have a major impact on a local econ­o­my that is already weak. Enter­gy has promised $10 mil­lion over five years for eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, and there are a lot of com­pet­ing ideas for that mon­ey. The Safe and Green Cam­paign, among oth­ers, will be here to watch­dog the decom­mis­sion­ing process, and two of our mem­bers have been nom­i­nat­ed to a state pan­el that will be close­ly involved in over­see­ing that.

Peo­ple are scared. Fear can make it hard to think through things well. They are scared about what’s going to hap­pen with prop­er­ty val­ues and small busi­ness­es already hang­ing on by a very thin thread. They have a fun­da­men­tal dis­qui­et with devel­op­ing many small pow­er gen­er­at­ing facil­i­ties that use solar and wind. They believe they need big facil­i­ties to gen­er­ate enough pow­er. And they don’t seem to real­ly take con­ser­va­tion and effi­cien­cy seriously.

Now there’s a pro­pos­al to use the VY site for bio­mass with a tie in to a nat­ur­al gas pipeline that’s try­ing to go through just south in Mass­a­chu­setts. Lots of peo­ple are jump­ing at this like it’s actu­al­ly the answer to every­thing. (Remem­ber what I said about what being scared does to us?) After all, there are heavy duty trans­mis­sion lines there, a rail­road run­ning right by the front gates, a well-estab­lished lum­ber indus­try, a riv­er, an inter­state. For four decades we’ve been liv­ing with the insan­i­ty of boil­ing water with radioac­tiv­i­ty to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty. We don’t think replac­ing that by burn­ing bio­mass and emit­ting par­tic­u­lates and green­house gas­es, pres­sur­ing our beau­ti­ful forests, and burn­ing more fracked gas makes any more sense than nuclear. As my friend Leslie said, “Bye-bye local­ly grown, tru­ly green ener­gy devel­op­ment. Hel­lo, huge facil­i­ty owned by yet anoth­er con­glom­er­ate of cor­po­rate investors.”

The Safe and Green Cam­paign has always had to empha­size the “safe” part of our work because we have been liv­ing under the pall of cat­a­stro­phe for so long. But our ban­ner doesn’t have a “No Nukes” sym­bol on it. It has an icon­ic pic­ture of the sun’s glo­ri­ous rays, and we need to shift our bal­ance more and more to the “green” part of our work. Now we need to edu­cate our­selves even more about all the ways to pro­duce sus­tain­able ener­gy, and tap into our allies who helped cre­ate Vermont’s pro­gres­sive plan for devel­op­ing renew­able ener­gy. We need to be able to make sense to the peo­ple who are scared, with good rea­son, about our com­mu­ni­ties’ sur­vival. We have been reach­ing out to the local 350.org group and oth­ers, and that’s good. We need to keep reach­ing out and take it as far up and across the pow­er “food chain” as we can. This isn’t a “one site at a time” issue. It’s a nation­al and inter­na­tion­al trav­es­ty that will send us to cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe if we don’t all work together.