The event included presentations made by pro-nuclear, relicensure advocate Meredith Angwin of the Ethan Allen Institute and VT Public Interest and Research Group (VPIRG) representative and opponent of relicensure James Moore.
Angwin told students and community members that “we all want clean, safe, reliable energy” and went on to explain what she called the “inconvenient truth about renewables” citing renewables’ destabilization of the grid.
When the discussion turned to the recent disaster in Fukushima, Japan, Angwin said that the nuclear plants “actually did well in the earthquake but were brought down by the tsunami” calling the record-breaking earthquake an “amazing event where 200,000 people are missing or dead and infrastructure was destroyed.”
Angwin went on to say that “nothing is impossible” in terms of a similar natural disaster happening here but that “nuclear is an important part of our future and we don’t stop cooking for fear of choking.”
Moore spoke in front of a projection of a political cartoon that made light of the situation in Japan; but the news is “anything but” with workers in Japan receiving the annual allowed limit of radiation exposure within the first three to six minutes.
“The bottom line is that Vermont Yankee is a for-profit company and the owners will run it until it breaks. Vermont Yankee is so old federal regulators wouldn’t allow it to be built today. The design is inherently flawed, the containment is completely inadequate; the good news is that we don’t have to rely on it anymore,” he said, calling this the “new energy era.”
In terms of renewables, Angwin said that the problem is often that the installations lack a storage mechanism. “The only thing that is going to substitute Vermont Yankee is fossil fuels; and it’s not coming to a substation near you,” she said. Wind turbines, she said, are often backed up by natural gas.
Moore said the cost of decommissioning Vermont Yankee could run as high as $800 million to $1 billion for the tear down, clean up and waste protection. Waste will be shipped to locations around the country for storage, depending on the level of radioactivity.
In response to a question about the cost of building a new nuclear power plant, Moore said, “Nuclear plants are more expense than solar power; that’s why they’re not getting built.”
Angwin estimated that there would be between 1,100 and 1,300 jobs lost as a result of decommissioning, with the many higher-ranking administrative positions lost forever.
CVRPC’s energy coordinator Nancy Notterman has been working with Harwood Union’s Jean Berthiaume to arrange guest speakers about energy; students have spent the last five weeks learning about energy in Vermont and beyond.
Students conducted interviews with local community members and generated questions focused on energy use years ago and presently.
Among the many guest experts, students learned how to site a building when considering energy efficiency with CVRPC’s planner Jen Mojo. They also learned about the Vermont Renewable Energy Atlas, developed by the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund with Scott Sawyer. It utilizes data from many sources as well as data about all renewable energy installations throughout the state.
{loadnavigation}
