Editor’s note: This editorial was first published in the Waterbury Record on Aug. 20, 2015.
[F]ederal regulation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon has been a travesty since before the plant began operating in 1972. And now, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has underlined the fact that it’s way too cozy with the nuclear plant it’s supposed to oversee.
The commission has decided that the plant’s final owner, Entergy Corp. of Louisiana, has enough money to decommission the plant over a 60-year period, So, it says, the power company can tap the decommissioning fund for $225 million to change the way it stores the nuclear fuel that once powered the Vermont Yankee plant, and guard it into the future.
That’s not right, say Attorney General William Sorrell, Green Mountain Power and the Vermont Department of Public Service. They have gone to federal appeals court, arguing that the decommissioning fund — built up with money from ratepayers between 1972 and December 2014, when the plant stopped operating — is only for decommissioning the highly radioactive site.
Green Mountain Power notes that its ratepayers contributed 55 percent of the $665 million in the decommissioning fund, and they should get back any money left over after decommissioning work. If the money is used for other purposes, they’ll never get it back.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ignored or overruled Vermont repeatedly over the life of the Vermont Yankee plant.
The issue involves storing the highly radioactive fuel rods that powered the nuclear plant. Those rods will be radioactive for thousands of years. Because the federal government never established a dump for highly radioactive waste, every fuel rod ever used at Vermont Yankee is still in Vernon — 2,996 fuel assemblies in the storage pool inside the plant’s radiation-containment area; 884 more didn’t fit in the pool, and are inside 13 steel-reinforced concrete casks stored outdoors on the plant’s grounds. By 2020, Entergy plans to move all the spent fuel to casks.
The state argues that’s not decommissioning. That’s managing spent fuel — which has been the plant’s job since it began operating. It’s no surprise that nuclear plants pile up a lot of spent fuel rods; Entergy should have planned for that.
“They made the profits, and now we, Vermonters, are paying for the cleanup,” says Arnie Gundersen, a longtime Vermont Yankee critic.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ignored or overruled Vermont repeatedly over the life of the Vermont Yankee plant.
Consider what happened in the last decade of the plant’s operating life: Radioactive tritium leaked out of the plant and into the groundwater, and it almost certainly oozed into the adjacent Connecticut River. The tritium came from underground pipes that several Entergy officials testified did not exist; they later had to correct themselves. A spectacular cooling-tower collapse spewed water like a waterfall, and Entergy had to concede the collapse resulted from deficiencies in its inspection and maintenance program. Later, a simple inspection found more cooling-tower support beams that had deteriorated, causing more safety issues.
What did the NRC do? It gave Vermont Yankee a 20-year extension of its operating license, though the plant called it quits long before the 20 years were up.
Please, federal appeals court: Do the right thing.
