In the last three years, a series of minor disasters -- both
environmental and political -- has hit Vermont's only nuclear plant and
Entergy, the Louisiana company that bought it a decade ago.
- Tritium, a radioactive isotope, is leaking out of the plant and
into the groundwater which provides the drinking water for Vernon. The
tritium-tainted underground pool of radioactive water is now the size
of a football field and at least 30 feet deep.
- The tritium-tainted water is almost certainly oozing
into the Connecticut River, a waterway that is owned by New Hampshire,
and downstream into nearby Massachusetts.
- The tritium comes from underground pipes. Last year,
several Entergy officials testified that the plant had no underground
pipes carrying
radionuclides. The leak has triggered a perjury investigation.
- A spectacular cooling-tower collapse at Vermont Yankee
in August 2007 spewed water like a waterfall, and Entergy had to
concede the collapse resulted from deficiencies in its inspection and
maintenance program. All that was fixed by September 2008, Entergy
assured the state, but a simple inspection found more cooling-tower
support beams that had deteriorated, causing more safety issues. The
plant's 38-year history is littered with incidents like these, although
the tritium leak is the most serious.
When Vermont Yankee proposed boosting its power output by 20 percent, I
assigned a reporter to see what had happened with other General
Electric boiling-water reactors that went through what the industry
calls "an uprate." None was as big as 20 percent, but every single one
of those uprated reactors resulted in cracks in the steam dryer. Every
one. And what do you know? A year after the uprate, Vermont Yankee had
cracks in its steam dryer.
It has taken a very long time, but finally Vermont's leaders are
looking beyond cheap energy and jobs, and are seeing Vermont Yankee as
the major safety issue it is. Had Montpelier been anywhere near Vermont
Yankee's 10-mile evacuation zone, this conversion would have happened
long ago. It certainly did in Hinsdale, NH, whose elementary and high
schools sit on a plateau directly across the river from the nuclear
plant. Vermont Yankee's emergency evacuation plan says that, in a
disaster, school-bus drivers will leave their homes and families and
drive their buses to the Hinsdale schools to get the kids. Sure they
will. As one of Hinsdale's emergency officials said, everybody knows
what the real evacuation plan is: "Get on Interstate 91 and floor it."
You have to be able to trust the people who run a nuclear plant. They
handle the most dangerous material on earth. If they make a big
mistake, thousands of lives will be at stake, and the intersection of
Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts could be uninhabitable for
thousands of years. Brattleboro could be a ghost town.
The trust is gone. Pull the plug.
Tom Kearney is managing editor of The Stowe Reporter<D> and Waterbury Record.
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