A storm of public opinion against extending the operating license of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vt., near Brattleboro, is gathering, intensified by new revelations last week of poor maintenance practices on the part of the plant's owner.
On Tuesday, March 3, town meeting warrants all around Vermont carried articles on whether the plant's operating license should be extended from 2012 to 2032. Though they were nonbinding, the Brattleboro Reformer described the articles in more than 40 communities as "the closest thing to a statewide referendum we will see" on the relicensing issue.
By the next day, 33 towns, including Brattleboro, Marlboro, Dummerston, Guilford and Putney, had voted against keeping the plant operating past 2012.
Many towns also passed articles that included a demand that the plant's owner foot the entire bill for decommissioning. That's a controversial issue because the owner's decommissioning fund was estimated last summer to be at least $400 million short of the estimated cost of retiring the plant.
(Last November the fund had $361 million, down from $440 million before September due to market losses, while the cost of decommissioning is estimated at $750 million to $990 million. By the end of January the fund had earned back $12 million, still leaving it far below even the low end of estimated decommissioning costs.)
In Brattleboro, residents voted 1,097 to 438 to deny the license extension, make the company pay for decommissioning, and use renewable energy, other power sources and conservation to make up for the loss of power from the nuke.
Later, on Tuesday, March 17, a Public Oversight Panel formed by the state to deal with concerns about the nuclear plant reported that two widely publicized mishaps there, a transformer fire in 2004 and a cooling tower collapse in 2007, were caused by a lack of thorough inspection.
Arnie Gundersen of Burlington, a former nuclear industry executive and one of five authors of the report, told the Associated Press that prior to the cooling tower, plant employees had asked for extra time and funds to do more detailed inspections of the cooling towers and and been refused by the plant's owner, Entergy of Mississippi.
Gundersen told the Advocate that the panel uncovered still more evidence of neglect at the plant.
"There were 19 years of inspections they should have done on the transformer [that caught fire in 2004] and didn't," he said. "They didn't have enough people to put data into the computer for their flow-acceleration corrosion program [which monitors the condition of pipes in the plant]. They didn't put data into the computer for five years." The latter omission may mean that data submitted by Entergy to groups requesting information about the condition of the plant in those years was inaccurate, Gundersen said.
Vermont Yankee spokesman Rob Williams told the Advocate that the company has "made many upgrades to the structure of the [cooling] tower and to the inspection program," and that even before the panel's report was written, Entergy had acknowledged that the cooling tower and transformer mishaps could have been avoided. Any other problems uncovered by the panel, Williams said, will be "investigated and resolved."
The report is part of a review ordered by the Vermont State Legislature as it prepares to vote on whether or not the plant's license should be extended. No date has yet been set for that vote.
Vermont is the only state that requires a vote by its legislature on license renewal for a nuclear power plant. It is not clear whether the federal government would consider the Legislature's vote valid if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the plant final permission to operate until 2032.
