Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance

According to the AP article below, an automatic shutdown of the VT Yankee reactor was initiated during routine testing of the steam valves today.

An independent safety assesment of the reactor is clearly imperative due to the continuing mechanical failures at the plant.

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Shuts Down Automatically Amid Test

August 30, 2007: 05:12 PM EST

VERNON, Vt. (AP)–The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant went off-line Thursday after an automatic shutdown. Plant officials said the shutdown occurred at 3:12 p.m. EDT during routine testing of steam valves. Plant technicians are trying to determine the cause of the automatic shutdown. Officials said the plant remains in a safe and stable condition and will be restarted after engineers complete a thorough evaluation of the shutdown. Prior to the shutdown, the plant had been operating at a 62% power level to allow repairs on one of the plants two cooling towers.

A Cooling Tower Collapse Raises Concerns about a New License for the Aging Vermont Yankee Reactor

After key components of a Vermont Yankee cooling tower fell to the ground Tuesday, members of Safe Power Vermont are saying “no” to renewing Entergy’s license to operate for another 20 years.

Safe Power Vermont - a coalition of experienced citizen, environmental, legal, and anti-nuclear organizations committed to closing the nuclear power plant - said that while alarming, the collapse of the cooling tower is not surprising.

“Vermont Yankee is running at 120% of its designed capacity. This surge in power combined with its already ailing infrastructure leaves Vermont Yankee incredibly vulnerable to dangerous accidents just like this one,” said Deb Katz, Executive Director of Citizens Awareness Network.

Advocates questioned the clean bill of health that the cooling tower recently received from Entergy’s experts. They called into question Vermont Yankee’s claims that the 35 five year old reactor is not experiencing serious aging strain that jeopardizes the plant’s future. “Vermont Yankee telling us that the plant is running like new is like a hair dresser telling you that you look twenty years younger, its nice to hear but far from the truth,” said James Moore, Clean Energy Advocate for VPIRG.

The plant’s history of defects and accidents is not insignificant. Just in the past decade, Vermont Yankee has documented 76 cracks in its steam dryer, three fires in its transformer station, a dangerously overcrowded spent fuel pool for radioactive waste and now a cooling tower collapse. Despite this, Entergy is aggressively looking to extend the plant’s license to operate for an additional 20 years.

Advocates also noted that Vermont Yankee benefited from the recent expiration of a rate payer protection plan. This fact will leave Green Mountain Power, Central Vermont Public Service, and Vermont rate payers with higher bills in the future.

“Any further reliance on Vermont Yankee will pass on both a financial, as well as safety risk to future generations. Vermont Yankee was built to run 40 years and at 35 it is already testing father time, the plant must close in 2012,”said Ed Anthes of Nuclear Free Vermont.

In accordance with Act 160, the Vermont legislature has the power to prevent Vermont Yankee from running past its 2012 lifespan. Safe Power Vermont says the coalition will continue to work for the facility’s closure to prevent a seemingly inevitable accident of catastrophic proportions.

For Immediate Release: August 22, 2007

For More Information:

James Moore, 223-5221
Deb Katz, 413- 339- 5781
Chris Williams: 802- 767- 4276

From Rutland Herald

U.S. Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., is to introduce legislation today that he says would strengthen safety at nuclear reactors across the country.

Sanders said Tuesday he was introducing the bill on the anniversary of the accident at Three Mile Island, the country’s worst commercial nuclear disaster, to draw attention to the need for improved safety at the country’s 104 nuclear reactors.

Sanders said the bill would give governors and public utilities commissions, such as the Vermont Public Service Board, the ability to require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do an independent safety assessment of reactors under certain conditions.

Those conditions include relicensing of reactors, power boosts, and problem areas in the operation of the plant.

“We’re trying to develop the strongest inspection system,” Sanders said Tuesday. “This is the most far-reaching legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate on plant safety.”

The bill would be patterned in part on the special inspection at Maine Yankee in 1996. That in-depth inspection revealed serious problems that its owning utilities decided were too expensive to fix and they shut down the plant. It has since been dismantled.

Sanders said he proposed the bill after hearing from many Vermonters concerned for a very long time about the safety of Vermont Yankee, the state’s only nuclear reactor.

Under Sanders’ bill, the governors of not just the host state, but any state that falls within the emergency planning zone would have the power to ask for such a safety review. In Vermont’s case, that would include New Hampshire and Massachusetts as Vermont Yankee is located in Vernon, near those states, in the southeastern corner of Vermont.

Sanders said so far there are no co-sponsors on the legislation, but he said he was hoping to gain sponsors in the Senate, as well as for a House version of the bill. He said the bill would face intense opposition from the nuclear power industry.

“The pro-nuclear industry is very powerful and they would certainly prefer to have all inspections done by the NRC. We have a president that is very, very sympathetic to nuclear power,” Sanders said.

The proposed legislation brought a guarded response from the owners of Vermont Yankee, and cheers from anti-nuclear activists, who have long lobbied state officials, and more recently, congressional leaders, for such a review.

“There’s no question, Bernie is the leader on this issue. We’ve got a rising tide of concern from officials in New Jersey and New York and Massachusetts and Vermont, asking for independent safety assessment, prior to putting a plant extended license,” said Raymond Shadis, senior technical advisor for the New England Coalition, the state’s oldest and largest anti-nuclear group.

Shadis said there were “huge” differences between what Sanders was seeking, and the review done on Vermont Yankee by the NRC in 2004 at the request of the Vermont Public Service Board, which wanted the review before the plant boosted power production by 20 percent.

The NRC added 400 hours of work to its annual review in Vermont. In the case of Maine Yankee, more than 4,000 hours of onsite inspection, and between 10,000 and 12,000 hours of office work was added, Shadis said.

“Back in 1997, the NRC said ‘the more you look, the more problems you find,’” Shadis said.

Yankee’s owner, Entergy Nuclear, is taking a wait-and-see approach.

“The general consensus in the industry [is] that key parts of the Maine Yankee inspection process were long-ago incorporated into the present, routine NRC inspection program,” said Entergy Nuclear spokesman Robert Williams.

“We’re still reviewing the legislation,” he said, noting the company had received an advance copy of the bill from Sanders’ office.