Sen. John Campbell: Yankee supporters’ complaints about the legislative process are a “sideshow.”
Senate President Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, told reporters on Wednesday that the Vermont Senate has spoken: Vermont Yankee should be retired as scheduled in 2012.
Shumlin and Sen. John Campbell, vice president of the Senate, held the press conference immediately after the Senate decided by an overwhelming majority, 26-4, to block renewal of a 20-year license for Vermont Yankee to continue operating beyond its original decommissioning date of March 2012.
Shumlin, who orchestrated the legislative maneuver, said he was ready to move on to debate the jobs bill in the Senate today, and he predicted that the move to close the plant would be the harbinger of a new economic boom in Vermont, and perhaps the nation as “we move off of our addiction to foreign oil.”
“This vote opens up the opportunity for Vermont to become the first state in the country that truly delivers on efficiency,” Shumlin said.
In the debate leading up to the vote on the floor of the Senate, several senators took issue with the way the vote had been handled. They complained that they only became aware of the scheduled vote the week before – when Shumlin made the announcement in a press conference.
The senators questioned whether enough consideration had been given to the economic impact of closing the plant on the town of Vernon, where the plant is located, and the surrounding area. The day of the vote, copies of an economic impact statement issued before the state of Maine shut down its nuclear power plant were made available to senators because a similar report that was supposed to be produced for Vermont Yankee wasn’t scheduled to be finished until April.
Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin-Grand Isle, said businesses hadn’t been given an opportunity to testify in Senate committees about how the closure of the plant would impact them financially.
At the press conference, when a reporter queried Shumlin about the complaints, he listed off the arguments that supporters of Vermont Yankee had made to keep the plant open — namely that nuclear power is cheap, safe, reliable and clean. He said none of these arguments were adequate in light of the tritium leak at the plant.
“What do they have left?” Shumlin asked. “Process, Shumlin’s running for governor, and this vote doesn’t mean anything.”
Campbell said Senate finance and natural resources and energy committees have taken testimony on Vermont Yankee for four years. He said senators had enough information to make a common sense decision.
Yankee supporters’ complaints about the legislative process are a “sideshow,” Campbell said.
It was ironic, in Shumlin’s view, that lawmakers were asking him to use the same deliberative process that was used in the passage of the gay marriage bill last year because he said opponents of that law used the same “rush to judgment” arguments during that debate as well.
“When there are contentious votes and you’ve got nothing else, that’s the argument you use,” Shumlin said.
The economic impact of closing Vermont Yankee, he said, will not be immediate because the cost of decommissioning the plant will likely be $1 billion, or even as much as $2 billion, “once we get to the bottom of the tritium leak.”
“That’s a lot of jobs, a lot of opportunity,” Shumlin said.
When asked if he supports new nuclear power plants, Shumlin said the federal government should think more clearly about investing in more nuclear technology.
“This is not a debate about old or new nuclear power,” Shumlin said. “This is a debate about old nuclear power. There are 103 plants in this country and many leak tritium. They’re falling apart. They were designed to be closed down. We seem to (operate) in a vacuum without looking at what’s really happening. We can’t seem to see the forest for the trees. There’s only one nuclear power plant on this planet that has actually run for 46 years. It’s in England.”
Shumlin demurred when asked if he would support building a state of the art nuclear facility on the Vernon site.
“I’m not going to waste my time on things that will probably never happen,” Shumlin said. “I don’t believe we’re going to see more nuclear power plants being built in America.”
