The final chapter may be opening in dealings between the state of Vermont and Entergy, the company that in 2002 bought the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant at Vernon, near Brattleboro.
In an era when aging American nukes were being bought up at fire sale prices, Louisiana-based Entergy beat out another company, Amergen, with a bid of $180 million for the then-30-year-old reactor (Amergen had initially bid only $23.5 million for the reactor, which had cost $220 million to build). Such sales aroused fears that plants bought on the cheap would be run on the cheap, giving good maintenance short shrift.
From early on, Entergy was open about its hope of getting the plant’s operating license extended for 20 years beyond its originally designated shutdown date of 2012. But in a memorandum of understanding it signed in 2002, Entergy agreed to abide by the state Public Service Board’s decision in the matter of the license renewal. A state law, Act 160, passed in 2006, also stipulated that no license for any nuclear power plant could be extended without a “certificate of public good” from the Public Service Board, and that the certificate could not be issued without the approval of both houses of the Legislature.
Fast forward to Wednesday, February 24, 2010. Following years of demonstrations capped by thousands of telephone calls to state legislators last month, the Vermont state Senate voted 26 to 4 not to allow the operating license for Vermont Yankee to be extended to 2032.
Because the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission reserves the right to rule on the safety of a plant’s operation, the Legislature is restricted from basing a vote on safety considerations. But Act 160 gave the Legislature the right to consider issues relating to economics and “reliability.” Earlier in the decade, a series of mishaps including a transformer fire and a cooling tower collapse underscored reliability issues.
Then Entergy floated a plan to spin Yankee and five other nuclear plants off into a new company, Enexus, which would start life with a $3.5 billion debt and financial ratings below investment grade. The plan set off fears that the new company would not be able to finance the decommissioning of the plant.
That, together with inaccurate statements by Entergy officials about the infrastructure that was recently found to be leaking tritium at unsafe levels, gave legislators additional issues of reliability and economics to consider as they voted.
Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said following the vote that the plant’s operators “remain determined to prove our case to the Legislature, state officials and the Vermont public.” The NRC had favored the license extension; its reaction to the vote remains to be seen. It would be possible for the agency to contest the vote by asserting its right to pre-empt jurisdiction over the plant.
But Deb Katz of Citizens’ Awareness Network, one of the groups that helped craft Act 160, said she does not think a challenge by the NRC is likely.
“In the NRC’s own regulations it says that a state can decide whether it wants a reactor to operate within its boundaries based on economics, as long as it doesn’t involve safety,” Katz said. “Entergy in its memorandum of understanding agreed to abide by all legislative decisions. It is not in a very good position.”
In 1989, a local referendum closed down the Rancho Seco reactor near Sacramento because of frequent outages and high electric rates. Prior to that, the Supreme Court had affirmed the jurisdiction of the NRC over the safety of radioactive emissions from nuclear plants, but it had also upheld the rights of states to make decisions involving the economics of the plants.
