TO THE EDITOR: THE NORTHFIELD NEWS IT’S HARD TO FATHOM why anybody is willing to give the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant any more slack.

Things are going wrong there, the company plays footsie with the truth, and lousy maintenance makes it seem likely things will get worse.

In the last three years, a series of minor disasters ‹ both environmental and political

has hit Vermont?s only nuclear plant and Entergy, the Louisiana company that bought it a decade ago.

Tritium, a radioactive isotope, is leaking out of the plant and into the groundwater, which in tiny Vernon, Vt., is the source of drinking water for townspeople. In some places, the tritium levels are 40 times the limit for safe drinking water. The tritiumtainted underground pool of radioactive water is now the size of a football field, and at least 30 feet deep.

The tritium-tainted water is almost certainly oozing into the Connecticut River, a waterway that is owned by New Hampshire, and downstream into nearby Massachusetts. Both those states are alarmed.

The tritium comes from underground pipes. Last year, several Entergy officials testified that the plant had no underground pipes carrying radionuclides. The leak has triggered a perjury investigation.

A spectacular cooling-tower collapse at Vermont Yankee in August 2007 spewed water like a waterfall, and Entergy had to concede the collapse resulted from deficiencies in its inspection and maintenance program.

All that was fixed by September 2008, Entergy assured the state, but a simple inspection found more cooling-tower support beams that had deteriorated, causing more safety issues.

The plant?s 38-year history is littered with incidents like these, although the tritium leak is the most serious.

I lived about 15 miles from the plant for 33 years. As a boy editor, I supervised news coverage of the federal hearings on giving Vermont Yankee its operating license in 1972. Before I took this job in Stowe in 2005, oversaw news coverage of Vermont Yankee.

That coverage included construction snafus, bogus evacuation plans, and lost radioactive fuel rods.

When Vermont Yankee proposed boosting its power output by 20 percent, I assigned a reporter to see what had happened with other General Electric boiling-water reactors that went through what the industry calls ?an uprate.? None was as big as 20 percent, but every single one of those uprated reactors resulted in cracks in the steam dryer. Every one. And what do you know? A year after the uprate, Vermont Yankee had cracks in its steam dryer.

Why was everybody surprised? If a lowly newspaper reporter can predict that outcome, what?s wrong with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission?

Here?s what: The commission?s job is, first, to advocate peaceful use of nuclear power and, second, to regulate those uses. Having advocated nuclear power, it is loath to second-guess itself. Once it finishes reviewing an issue, it almost never takes another look, no matter what new evidence emerges.

For instance, reports emerged years after Vermont Yankee was finished that some of the construction work was shoddy. One example: Workers accidentally sheared off the heads of giant bolts intended to hold the plant together, and covered up by gluing the bolt heads back in place. The federal commission said it had already ruled on the plant?s safety, and that was that. Let?s hope that glue holds.

Enormous hubris is involved in running a nuclear plant. The managers? mantra is that nothing can go wrong that hasn?t been anticipated and planned for, and under no circumstances will any health dangers be posed by any problems that might crop up.

When your emphasis is on keeping the lid on, to make everyone think you?re in control of circumstances, truth often takes a back seat. It certainly has at Vermont Yankee.

And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn?t much better. Note how the NRC is downplaying the tritium leak.

It has taken a very long time, but finally Vermont?s leaders are looking beyond cheap energy and jobs, and are seeing Vermont Yankee as the major safety issue it is. Had Montpelier been anywhere near Vermont Yankee?s 10-mile evacuation zone, this conversion would have happened long ago.

It certainly did in Hinsdale, N.H., whose elementary and high schools sit on a plateau directly across the river from the nuclear plant. Vermont Yankee?s emergency evacuation plan says that, in a disaster, schoolbus drivers will leave their homes and families and drive their buses to the Hinsdale schools to get the kids. Sure they will. As one of Hinsdale?s emergency officials said, everybody knows what the real evacuation plan is: ?Get on Interstate

91 and floor it.?

And get this: What happens when you leak radioactive water, scale back on crucial maintenance, lie to the government, and run low on decommissioning money? You turn into a hero on Wall Street. The finance industry magazine Institutional Investor lists Entergy as the top electric utility in the country and one of the top nine companies in the nation. Its CEO, the one who waited more than a week to call back Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas when the tritium started leaking, was ranked as the top CEO in the power industry, and Entergy chief financial officer Leo Denault was named the best CFO in the electric utility sector for the second straight year. In a conference call with investors Feb. 2, Denault said fourth-quarter cash flow was up $300 million, in part due to ?lower working capital requirements.? Wonder how that happened?

You have to be able to trust the people who run a nuclear plant. They handle the most dangerous material on earth. If they make a big mistake, thousands of lives will be at stake, and the intersection of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts could be uninhabitable for thousands of years. Brattleboro could be a ghost town.

The trust is gone. Pull the plug.

TOM KEARNEY

Stowe

Tom Kearney is managing editor of the Stowe Reporter and Waterbury Record.

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