BRATTLEBORO — Vermont Governor Jim Douglas was technically correct when he described the Senate's recent high-profile Vermont Yankee vote as “meaningless.” By rejecting the bill that would have given the Public Service Board authority to issue a Certificate of Public Good to Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee, the Senate effectively didn't change a thing.
As things now stand, we still have a scenario where the now-beleaguered nuclear power plant will be powerless to continue operating in Vermont without that certificate after its original 40-year license expires March 21, 2012, even if the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives the plant its blessing.
That's most certainly not meaningless.
The Senate vote did have some flaws. Despite Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin's assertion that there was no more testimony to take on the issue, that argument doesn't quite pass the sniff test.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that given all the negatives, any further positive testimony would ring hollow, any further negative testimony would ring redundant, and Shumlin had amassed a large enough group of his colleagues who had heard enough after four years of testimony.
That's simply being practical, and in the end, that logic worked.
Despite some strenuous arguments on the floor from several passionate - and, seemingly, increasingly desperate - Senate supporters of the plant, the sheer margin of the 26–4 vote illustrated the deep, wide rift between state lawmakers and the Louisiana-based company that has behaved so poorly for so long in so many ways.
It's difficult to see any evidence that the company's lawyers were correct when they told the Public Service Board in January that Entergy “gets it.”
At the State House on the eve of the Senate's vote for decisive and deliberate inaction, the company rolled out further financial incentives. “Vermonters Offered More Than $20 Million in Reduced Cost Electricity,” said the headline of the press release.
Curt Hébert Jr., the company's executive vice president of external affairs, looked citizens in the eye and said the timing of the offer had nothing to do with the impending vote. At best, this behavior profoundly disrespects Vermonters' intelligence. At worst, it exposes the company that had issued its “last, best offer” only in December as manipulative.
The next morning, Hébert held another press conference about Entergy's internal investigation into the false testimony, in the spirit of “Entergy and VY being more transparent, and accurate, and timely with information,” he said.
Hébert then announced that he would refuse any questions, proceeded to read a press release verbatim, and walked briskly from the room.
That's not transparency.
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The company is not giving up.
Entergy's message is nothing if not consistent: the company insists its “misstatements” are a matter of nuance and misunderstanding. In a statement issued in response to the vote, the company said that the fight is “far from over.”
As Shumlin pointed out candidly on the floor, the legislature is free to revisit this issue in the next biennium - as it would be to revisit any other issue that comes before the lawmakers.
From the town of Vernon to the company's vendors in Rutland (cited repeatedly on the floor during the debate) to the community and nonprofit organizations that have come to rely on Entergy's corporate charity, a number of entities very much oppose the Senate's vote. Some citizens still feel loyal to the plant for any number of economic reasons. That is their right and their privilege.
New energy sources will create new opportunities, and, of course, the decommissioning process will take years to complete and will continue to employ hundreds. But make no mistake - shutting down this plant will have a demonstrable, economically disruptive impact on the region and to a lesser extent on the state as a whole. It will be difficult.
The question is not if this is going to happen, but when.
The same arguments on the Senate floor - concern about what to do about the plant's hundreds of employees and contractors, concern about cost and viability of alternative energy sources - will only come up later if they aren't addressed now. Giving the plant license to continue operating is postponing the inevitable.
This is an excellent time for us as a community to address the temporary nature of the plant and the complicated issues associated with its closing. It is time to accept the fact that this plant is going to close in 2012, to come up with a long-range, fair, sensible approach to giving employees plenty of time to chart their future.
It's also time for VY to stop using its employees - and for the employees to stop using themselves - as an emotionally manipulative means to discourage people from discussing the plant and its broader place in our public policy. Few if any would be cruel enough to actually want to see VY employees or families hurt or displaced by the plant's decommissioning.
We really do care about the economic well-being of the plant's 650 employees, but not at the expense of the rest of the citizenry - not only Vermonters, but those who live in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York. The entire region must live with the long-term safety and economic consequences of this deteriorating plant's continued operation.
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Falls Area Television in Bellows Falls broadcast a tour of the plant in 1998, now archived on its Web site, www.fact8.org. It's haunting to see one of the tour guides, a younger and less stressed Larry Smith, now VY's communications director, showing host Charlie Jarras the spent fuel pool.
“Every fuel bundle that we have used in our reactor since we started operations in 1972 is sitting 40 feet below water in this pool,” Smith said. “It will remain here until it's taken by the Department of Energy to go to a disposal facility, an underground burial facility, in the Nevada desert called Yucca Mountain, probably in the year 2010.”
Fast forward 12 years to the present day. That facility, a hollowed-out mountain once envisioned as the ultimate destination for the nation's spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste, has not even been started, and it likely never will be. The Department of Energy will likely withdraw its application for the facility next week, and “the White House has said it intends to cut all funding from the Yucca Mountain project in 2011,” according to the project Web site.
This interview came in the days before Entergy came around, in the days before dry-cask storage, in the days when the here and now was a far-distant, abstract future. In 1998, it looked like something would be done about the radioactive waste that we now know will be stuck in Windham County for decades to come.
What will happen 12 years from now? How will we look back on 2010 and this most bizarre chain of events through the lens of 20/20 hindsight? In 2022, will we come to regret other aspects of this plant that still seem benign today?
Twelve years ago, few people in the area had reason to know about Entergy, the company. Who will own and operate the plant 12 years from now? The governor told Vermont Public Radio in February that he might have more confidence in the plant operated under different ownership.
What makes him, or anyone, think another regime would be better? The state's regulatory mechanisms that gave the thumbs up to the sale of VY to Entergy didn't protect Vermonters from the people, the processes, and the corporate culture that brought us to this present-day scenario.
As Douglas said, nothing has changed as a result of the Senate's vote. But if nothing changes now, nothing ever will.
So by doing something meaningless, the Senate has done everything meaningful, setting a way forward that, if it stands, will help us all begin the process of healing from 40 years of noxious, polarizing rifts over this old, flawed, leaking plant.