Editor’s note: This commentary is by Schuyler Gould, who is a member of Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance and a board member of New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution. He is a retired building contractor living in Barre.

[O]ne thing you can count on when a representative of the nuclear power industry speaks up, pretty much in any capacity, is that they will, at best, distort the truth, leave out critical facts, and often just lie.

As operations at Vermont Yankee seem to be winding down, there is a corresponding swirl of activity on the public relations front with all the usual suspects making their best pitch for continued relevance, or funding, or, in the case of the plant’s owner, Entergy, for sustaining the myth that it actually gives a damn about anything other than its bottom line.

Howard Shaffer, PE, retired nuclear engineer and member of the American Nuclear Society, recently in this space took on Vermont Speaker of the House Shap Smith for his concerns about Entergy’s storing in “kiddie” swimming pools tritiated groundwater leaking into the basement of the turbine building at Vermont Yankee and about who’s going to pay for it.

After a folksy entry, “Do any houses in Vermont also have leaky basements?” — i.e., “We’re just like everybody else.” — Shaffer reassures us, “Migrating groundwater has not been an ’emergency’ situation, but an expected part of the decommissioning process.” “Expected” because since Entergy shut down the reactor in December 2014, the heat from the turbine is no longer evaporating that very tritium-laced migrating groundwater.

He gushes, kind of like the groundwater, “Through the majority of its operating life, the plant has NOT(his emphasis) been discharging water to the river from radioactive systems … The plant did this on their own from the beginning, to be good environmental citizens.”

Can someone please tell me why the tritium is there in the first place, no longer contained by those “radioactive systems?” And why wasn’t it taken care of, besides evaporating it(presumably into the atmosphere), before decommissioning began, so that taking care of it now (for how long and at what expense we don’t know) won’t be an added burden to that Nuclear Decommissioning Trust fund (NDT)?

Mr. Shaffer finds Entergy’s actions fiscally “prudent;” the gist of Speaker Smith’s concerns, “For whom?”

Speaking of fiscally prudent, Vermont state Sens. Dick Mazza, Bobby Starr and Peg Flory, in a broadly circulated indictment of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s push to divest Vermont’s state pension fund from fossil fuels in general, and from its coal and ExxonMobil assets in particular, seem to relish the apparent irony of Shumlin’s previous efforts to close down Vermont Yankee — low-carbon vs. high carbon, something along those lines.

There is no irony here. One can actually oppose two wrongs at the same time, even if their premises don’t exactly mesh.

Oh, excuse me, I have to interrupt myself here. Congratulations, Governor! Let me shake your hand! I thought Entergy closed the plant for its own fiscally prudent reasons.

Anyway, it does actually seem a little ironic that while promoting “prosperity-based decision making” — you know, like what prevails at Entergy and ExxonMobil — the good senators seem incapable of contemplating other types of values-based government action — you know, truth, environmental justice, those kinds of things.

For instance, if you had a pile of cash, would you choose to invest it in a company which makes no bones about creating the most toxic environmental hazard known, with no understanding of how to safely dispose of it for the necessary 240,000 years, in exchange for letting you run your dishwasher? Or would you invest it, perhaps, in a company which, for years and years, knowingly lied to its investors, to its customers, to government regulators, to everyone about the true nature and effects of its activities? These are simple enough questions.

For now and ever it’s all about “jobs,” it’s all about “retirees’ livelihood,” who can disagree with that? It’s never about the erosion of all our livelihoods by the monopolization of energy production by cartels (nuclear, oil, coal) which bind us all to a way of doing business which is literally destroying the environment.

The senators’ lament that divestment will have “no measurable impact on the fossil fuel industry” does kind of jump out at me, not that that’s the important thing here, but particularly in light of the just announced victory by gnat-like Vermont over the multi-national corporate forces opposed to consumers’ right to know what’s in their pizza.

Not to mention the fact, when it comes right down to it, that both of these investments are becoming increasingly tenuous as people wake up to the devastation of these business models, often right in their own backyards.

“We need a practical approach to governance,” they proclaim. Regardless of the cost, apparently.

Speaking of cost, has anyone heard how Entergy has taken out lines of credit worth $145 million to transfer the remaining nuclear waste in the spent fuel pool to dry cask storage? Since its announcement in February of 2013, it has been endlessly referenced by the company in self-laudatory pronouncements and picked up by nuclear power defenders everywhere, Mr. Shaffer included yet again. What could be more generous than not saddling the NDT with these costs and thereby slowing the pace of decommissioning?

At the time, Entergy spokesman Marty Cohn stated, “We’re allowing the decommissioning to take place years sooner than it usually would.” I’m not sure what he meant by “usually,” no power plant in this country has been fully decommissioned under the so-called “SAFSTOR” (rhymes with “laughstore”) option chosen by Entergy, but anyway, 30 years sooner, it was claimed then. And recently in that same vein, Chris Wamser, Vermont Yankee’s site vice president, “We’re sensitive to the stakeholder concerns in connection with the decommissioning trust fund.”

I bet they are. But, those lines of credit Entergy would have us believe is an act of pure, selfless, beneficence is, actually, a purely practical matter. It gives them flexibility in spending the monies and also, as an added side benefit, avoids the public relations nightmare of having to repeatedly raid the NDT.

And, it turns out, Entergy is not risking a dime in the financial arrangement. It has been very public regarding the fact that it intends to sue the Department of Energy (DOE) for reimbursement for those fuel transfer costs covered by the lines of credit. Recently though, not so publicly, Entergy representative T. Michael Twomey was asked, under oath, at technical hearings before the Vermont Public Service Board, “… how do you recover the funds if, say, DOE recovery is not a hundred percent? Where do those funds that are not reimbursed come from?” Twomey’s response, “The NDT. So if we only have a 90 percent recovery against the Department of Energy, we would take the difference, the 10 percent, out of the NDT.”

And here we thought they were covering for us. Turns out we were on the hook all along. And what happened to that 30-year time savings?

I’m telling you, you’ve got to watch these guys, every single one of them, every single hour of the day. They are not to be trusted.