BRATTLEBORO — Big changes may be on the way for Vermont’s citizens’ panel on nuclear issues.
At a meeting Thursday night, longtime Chair Kate O’Connor announced that she will step away from the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel when her term expires this summer.
That prompted a larger discussion of the panel’s future. Some say the 19-member body needs more state resources and a redefined mission in order to remain relevant as major changes happen at the state’s only nuclear site.
It may be “a moment for us to step back and think differently about this,” said June Tierney, state Public Service Department commissioner.
The citizens advisory panel began meeting in September 2014, about three months before Entergy stopped power production at Vermont Yankee.
Entergy had announced its intention to shutter the Vernon plant the previous summer, and the state Legislature formed the advisory panel to address decommissioning issues. The panel’s duties include advising state officials and serving “as a conduit for public information and education.”
At one point, the panel struggled with its advisory role. With a diverse membership that includes Entergy representatives as well as longtime Vermont Yankee critics, it is difficult for the panel to come to consensus.
So the panel’s most-prominent role has been in fostering public discussion, education and debate.
Meetings regularly include presentations and question-and-answer periods with experts, nuclear industry representatives and governmental agencies. Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff came to Vermont at the panel’s request last year, the the U.S. Department of Energy – which is supposed to eventually remove the the plant’s spent nuclear fuel – is scheduled to present to the panel next month.
“We started really not knowing what we were doing, and over the last four years we’ve evolved into, I think, a really good group,” O’Connor said. “And we’ve been really fulfilling our No. 1 task, which is to make sure the public knows what’s going on with decommissioning.”
But from a logistical standpoint, O’Connor said the panel is not working well. That’s one reason she will ask the governor not to reappoint her when her term expires at the end of August: O’Connor says she’s simply burnt out.
Since she was appointed chair in January 2015, O’Connor said she has spent thousands of hours handling many aspects of the panel’s business. That runs the gamut from arranging for presenters to printing out paper nameplates for members; at one point, she even took meeting minutes.
“It’s a lot of time, especially if we’re meeting monthly,” O’Connor said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into putting on these meetings. It doesn’t just happen in a day.”
As a citizen member of the panel, O’Connor is entitled to a $50 stipend for each meeting. Otherwise, her work is uncompensated.
At Thursday’s meeting, several panel members praised O’Connor’s work over the past three and a half years.
“She has held together many duties … and has done so in an exemplary way, and that is not something that’s easily replaced,” Tierney said.
Replacing the chair isn’t the only task panel members face.
O’Connor called on the group to re-examine its operations and mission, in part because she believes the lack of resources and reliance on panel members’ volunteer work is “not sustainable.”
Also, with Vermont Yankee potentially transitioning to a new owner and an accelerated decommissioning project later this year, O’Connor said “it’s a really good time to just step back and say, ‘What should this panel be doing?’”
There seemed to be general agreement about that, but there’s not yet a clear path forward for the citizens’ group.
For one thing, no one can say where the panel might find more financial and administrative resources.
State statute is somewhat vague on the topic. The law founding the panel says the Public Service Department must “hire experts, contract for services and provide for materials and other reasonable and necessary expenses of the panel as the commissioner may consider appropriate on request of the panel from time to time.”
The law also says three state offices — the Public Service Department, the Agency of Human Services and the Agency of Natural Resources — “shall furnish administrative support to the panel, with assistance from the owners of (Vermont Yankee) as the commissioner of Public Service may consider appropriate.”
Currently, the Public Service Department pays for minute-taking and video recording for each meeting. A department employee, the state’s nuclear engineer, also assists at meetings.
There was discussion on Thursday of introducing legislation to boost state support for the citizens’ advisory group. But state Rep. David Deen, D-Westminster and a panel member, said he wasn’t sure how useful that would be given the current financial standoff between the Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott.
“At some point, without the administration’s support, introducing legislation is a vacant gesture — as we are finding out, in terms of what is going on in Montpelier, as we speak,” Deen said.
That led to a briefly heated exchange between Deen and Tierney, who objected to the lawmaker’s characterization. At the same time, Tierney acknowledged that there are no “bags of money back in Montpelier that will fund this operation.”
Tierney also said her agency is funded by a gross-receipts tax paid by Vermont utilities. “Every dime that’s spent on (the advisory panel) is money that’s actually coming from Vermont ratepayers,” she said.
The advisory panel might not need as much state support if its activities are scaled back. That was another possibility discussed at Thursday’s meeting.
Tierney said panel members should think about “what the reasonable scope is of this committee going forward.”
“I see a trimmer operation in our future, because we can’t always do what we can’t afford,” Tierney said.
But others cautioned that the panel shouldn’t be scaled back too far.
“I’m very concerned, because we are going into a potential transition at a very active time,” panel member Lissa Weinmann said. “There’s going to be a lot of hours put in.”
