The robosigning division of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has put its imprimatur on the relicensing application for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant near Brattleboro, Vt. Relicensing approvals seem automatic at the NRC, which with the Vermont Yankee decision logs relicensure number 62. So are the words that justify those approvals.
“We believe that [plant owner] Entergy, through an exhaustive review, meets all of our requirements and standards to be able to operate for another 20 years,” NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko robocommented to a gaggle of press last Thursday.
But in another matter the chairman offered more than an automatic comment. Vermont law allows state officials to deny the plant relicensure based on an agreement Entergy made with the state when it purchased the plant. The agreement says that Vermont’s Public Service Board must issue the plant a “certificate of public good” in order for it to be relicensed. Last year the state Senate voted not to allow the PSB to issue the certificate.
For years, however, many feared that the NRC would try to preempt the state law and force the relicensing. But Jaczko said the NRC “would not intervene” in a conflict between Entergy and the state of Vermont. “There are a variety of permits and actions that are required for this facility to operate,” he said. “The NRC’s action today is just one piece of that.”
Is that doubletalk—or would the NRC really back off and let the state lock the plant’s doors next year? One person who is clearly reassured by the chairman’s remarks about not intervening is Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who wants the plant gone. Shumlin says the NRC “feel[s] very strongly that Vermont has the right to make determinations about reliability, about the future of the plant, and the NRC has no intention of standing in our way.”
The Vermont Yankee plant, in operation since 1972, was scheduled to shut down in March, 2012. Its owner, Entergy of Lousiana, asked the NRC to extend its operating license until 2032. The plant now operates at 20 percent more than the capacity it was designed for, and has had accident after accident in recent years, including a cooling tower collapse and numerous internal and external leaks, including leaks of radioactive tritium from pipes its officials first said didn’t even exist. It’s located across a street from an elementary school.
In the larger picture, with gasoline well north of $3 a gallon, did anyone expect that the government was going to be seen as responsible for scuttling Yankee?
Just to make sure the NRC didn’t forget that larger picture, the agency was put on notice that it was being watched by U.S. senators David Vitter of Lousiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who wrote the NRC to demand that the relicensing approval for Yankee and another Entergy property, the Pilgrim plant at Plymouth, not be held up by public opposition near those plants. Inhofe is the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which oversees the NRC, and an avid fan of nuclear power (to say nothing of being one of Congress’s leading global warming deniers). Vitter is from Entergy’s home state and gets a couple of thousand in donations from them every year.
Their letter, written early last week, chastised the NRC for embracing “a dual standard regarding license renewal applicants: timeliness for those viewed to have no or ‘minimal’ local opposition and excessive, unmanaged delays for applications perceived to be more controversial.”
