Hostage to a Nuclear Plant

By Ray Shadis

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies”

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part One, 1791

History contains a few accounts of the purposeful or deliberate disservice of one generation to the next. In late antiquity and the onset of the dark ages, whole populations, stressed to the limits of survival, sold their children and children's descendents into slavery.

However, the continuing excretion of nuclear waste from nuclear electric-power stations represents the first time in recorded history that any single generation has methodically decided to serve its own convenience by leaving a dangerous, toxic legacy to burden multiple future generations. Only the most callous hearts are immune to the thought of producing deadly radioactive wastes and storing the slowly decaying mess for hundreds upon hundreds of years. A most cynical and twisted legacy: the gift that keeps on killing.
Anyone tuned to nuclear waste now understands that the contracted schedules for establishing a national high-level nuclear-waste repository out west have elapsed – collapsed, really, in a wave of technical incompetence and corrupted science. Meanwhile, by congressional mandate, the time has arrived for the Department of Energy to propose candidate sites for a repository back east. Where does this leave the radioactive waste produced by Vermont Yankee?
At a recent Vermont Public Service Board (VPSB) technical hearing, no one blinked when a radioactive waste dump – in the form of steel-and-concrete storage silos with a 100-year life expectancy for spent nuclear fuel – was proposed for the Vermont Yankee riverbank site in Vernon. This proposal-of-last-resort for local storage of high-level nuclear waste, be it for 40 years, 100 years, or indefinitely, stands in stark contrast to what the federal government and the nuclear industry promised Vermonters back in the1960s: safe, clean, economical, spent nuclear-fuel recycling and waste reduction.
The whole sad chain of events that brought Vermont to this crisis began with Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program in the late 1950s. It was designed, some say, to put a happy face on the peak of the nuclear arms race that we who are old enough to remember shudder to recall. Across the northern hemisphere mother's milk was turning into nuclear waste because it was laced with radioactive strontium-90 from weapons fallout. Ike cynically quipped that public opposition could be defused by confusing them on the difference between fission and fusion. Nuclear scientists concluded that if the cost of civilian nuclear (for generating electricity, making steel, mining, and even blowing a new trans-ocean canal through Nicaragua using chain of nuclear explosions) added up to only a 10-percent increase in the mutation rate, it would be worth the price.

Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) teams were deployed across the globe to promote nuclear power plants and to find utilities and industries willing to build them. While the AEC optimistically slated New England to host up to 50 of the 1,000 reactors proposed for the entire country, AEC had to “convince” reluctant New England utilities that if they didn't build atomic plants, then AEC would find outside investors who would. As a result of AEC's coercion, the utilities agreed to form consortia, mutually investing in each other's plants, while retaining at least 51-percent ownership within each host state.
In 1963 the first New England plant, the 200-megawatt Yankee-Rowe reactor, was brought on-line through the contributions of heavy federal subsidies, soon followed by Maine Yankee (800 MWe), Pilgrim(650 MWe), Millstone 1 (650 MWe), Connecticut Yankee (600 MWe), and Vermont Yankee (520 MWe). Central Vermont Public Service Corp. and Green Mountain Power owned controlling interests in the Yankee Nuclear Power Corp., which brought its Vernon reactor on-line in November 1972.

Of these original, first-generation plants, only Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee continue to operate. Rowe, Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee, and Millstone were all permanently closed between 1991 and 1997 following comprehensive examinations that uncovered numerous safety and design defects that were considered too expensive to remedy. It is interesting to note that up until the time these reviews were finalized, management at each closed facility had considered them to be excellent plants and well poised for 20-30-year license extensions. So far Entergy has avoided the same level of inspection for its Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim plants.

Meanwhile, something unexpected happened on the way to the 1,000-reactor scenario. In 1975, a fire burned out hundreds of electrical cables at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Station in Decatur, Alabama, leaving operators unable to bring the reactor to shutdown for two days. This event dried up investor funds. No new plants have been ordered, funded by private capital, since the Browns Ferry Fire. As of June 2004, only 132 U.S. commercial power reactors were constructed; only 104 remain licensed to operate, and 28 are permanently shut down.

The meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the melt, fire, and explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 confirmed Wall Street's anti-nuclear sentiment. Between 1974 and 1995, 98 pending commercial power reactor license applications for 66 sites were cancelled.

But back in Vermont in 1998, the Vermont Department of Public Service chastised the Vermont Yankee owner-utilities for not seeking a power uprate on the order of 5 percent. Ironically, VY owner-utilities, facing rising operating costs, witnessing the closing of sister “Yankee” plants and anticipating the regulatory axe to fall, were investigating how to decommission the plant without a fully funded reserve for that purpose.
VY owners, most likely to claim they had made a diligent attempt to recover their shareholders' investments in the nuclear market, decided to sell the plant to the highest bidder. In 2001 Vermont Yankee Power Corp. petitioned the VPSB for a Certificate of Public Good – and damn near got it – permitting sale of the plant to Amergen Corporation for approximately $12 million. I was in the hearing room toward the end of these purchase proceedings in 2002 when officials representing Entergy, a $14 billion Louisiana-based corporation with 14,000 employees, walked in literally unannounced. The VPSB immediately granted intervenor status to Entergy, although the energy giant had none of the qualifications required of ordinary intervenors for a Vermont proceeding. Entergy was an out-of-state entity with no legal, investment, or consumer ties to Vermont. The only ones in the room who did not appear surprised were the VPSB and the Public Service Department. Ah, the power of the nuclear industry's “Big Money!”

In short order VPSB set aside the Amergen deal and Entergy officials returned with an offer to purchase Vermont Yankee for close to $200 million – a price based on an aggressive three-part plan to boost reactor power to 120 percent, extend the plant's operating license, and make room for the added radioactive waste by shifting some spent fuel to outdoor dry cask storage.

At that moment the die was cast for the string of contentious regulatory decisions on both the state and federal levels that are pushing Vermont into the permanent radioactive waste-dump business.

A question of oversight

VPSB opened the door to a nuclear Trojan Horse – VY as a “merchant plant” that is no longer owned by regulated in-state utilities and answers only to federal regulators. To its credit, VPSB listened to the warnings generated by the public-interest intervenors, including New England Coalition, Conservation Law Foundation, and Citizen's Awareness Network, and granted approval of the sale, but on one condition. VPSB required Entergy to apply for a Certificate of Public Good for each of the three initiatives – uprate, license extension, and dry cask fuel storage. Of course, the worth of these conditions depended on the actual level of aggressive, proactive review.

It has proved to be small compensation for the fact that the sale of Vermont Yankee to an unregulated out-of-state owner essentially removed Vermont Yankee (save for these few conditions and a limited-term power contract) from all further state jurisdiction. In 2012, Vermont, while locked into hosting all of the plant's waste and assuming most of the risk for a disaster, will lose its current contract for discounted power and its jurisdiction over the plant. Vermont will be left with no say over any aspects of the plant's operation.

None.

At this juncture, the VPSB has already (and why would anyone think otherwise?) approved the uprate and will soon approve dry cask storage based on Entergy's $4 million-to-$6 million contribution to (oh, the irony) a clean energy fund. With regard to the third leg of its agenda, Entergy has announced that it will secure federal approval of its license extension before bringing the issue to VPSB. This smart move will effectively limit the VPSB to dithering about the fact that Vermont is addicted to Vermont Yankee for about one-third of the state's baseload electricity.

“Friends of Vermont Yankee” in state government, aided and abetted by well-funded corporate lobbyists in Montpelier, have so far succeeded in neutering efforts to bring on-line renewable, sustainable energy resources – most recently the state's aborted attempt to purchase the hydroelectric dams on the Connecticut River – to displace Vermont's only poison power station.
Since that monumental “non-decision” on the dams based on “risk to the state,” Vermonters have learned just how negligent the Republican administration and Democratic-controlled Legislature have been in developing a nuclear-free energy future. An examination of transcripts from the recent VPSB dry cask hearings will show that under cross-examination Department of Public Service witnesses admitted that inventories of appropriate energy mixes – recapture or generation-equivalent potential from distributed generation, energy efficiency, conservation, co-generation, and alternative sources (such as Canadian hydro) – have simply not been done. Public Service Department witnesses also admitted that the most obvious and elemental examinations and comparisons of the economic and rate-impact effects of closing similar antiquated nuclear power stations in Maine, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, have not been done with regard to Vermont Yankee.

‘IT' is coming

Along with the near-total collapse of the federal nuclear waste program, Vermonters must contemplate the evidence that the unthinkable nuclear accident can happen – happen today or tomorrow, and happen here. First the Browns Ferry, then the Three Mile Island near catastrophes. Now this winter we've read about the narrowly avoided disaster at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio; the NRC fined the plant's owners $25 million for failure to locate a boric acid leak that ate through six inches of steel reactor pressure vessel, leaving less than three-sixteenths of an inch of rust-proofing liner. That the reactor escaped a loss-of-coolant accident and procession to nuclear meltdown are miracles, which no fine, no matter how punitive, can cover up.

A realistic assessment of the risk (probability-x-consequences) of hosting a first-generation commercial nuclear plant raises a basic statistical question: Can It – the big accident – happen here?

There is no credible question of uncertainty. The next major release, meltdown, or nuclear fire cannot, in terms of scientific accuracy or moral honesty, be labeled an accident. It is an inevitability. The only viable questions are, “Where will it be?” and “How bad will it be?”

Can Vermont pull itself away from the nuclear disaster roulette wheel by 2012? Not if the NRC license review team functions as the ultimate authority. Will Vermont hold hostage dozens of future generations of Vermonters to a radioactive waste dump? Apparently yes. Entergy has bribed the VDPS with $4 million to $6 million for a renewable energy fund in return for permission to install dry cast storage. Only a last minute Vermont legislative action may avoid these pacts with the devil.

Who could believe Vermonters would aid and abet what may best be described as an intergenerational mugging?

Is this the Vermont way?