Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance

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.

From The Vermont Guardian

MONTPELIER - Vermont has joined six other states in a petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking them to assess the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel storage at reactors before they are allowed to extend their operating licenses.

The request is made in support of a petition before the NRC filed by the Massachusetts attorney general, asking them to set new national rules for how reactor safeguards are evaluated.

In recent weeks, anti-nuclear activists, a number of Windham County lawmakers - along with the entire Progressive Caucus - have been urging Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell to jump into the fight surrounding Entergy’s request to extend the operating license of Vermont Yankee beyond 2012.

“We’d love to see him actively involved as I think he’s a good advocate for the state’s positions and this is an issue of central importance to the people of Vermont,” said Rep. Dick Marek, D-Newfane, who penne the original letter that went from a number of county lawmakers.

“I don’t see a reason why the NRC would be unwilling to look at it this issue in a broader context, as it seems to me that it’s a set of fundamental questions that deserve answers,” added Marek.

Without any urging however, Sorrell had given the OK in December to join a multi-state letter of support to a petition filed by the Massachusetts attorney general.

None of the lawmakers, nor the activists urging Sorrell’s involvement, were made aware of this by the attorney general’s office.

While Sorrell considered sending a letter solely from Vermont, he opted for a multi-state effort.

“We often work with other states and the thought was if you get several states it’s not just a backyard argument, it’s a national issue and an issue based on the merits and not just the concerns of one state,” said Bill Griffin, chief assistant attorney general.

The Massachusetts Attorney General argued in a petition before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board - an advisory panel to the NRC -that officials needed to weigh the power station’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack due to the increased onsite storage of nuclear waste as a result of its recent power uprate and the additional storage needed to accommodate the proposed license extension.

The ALSB, and the NRC, rejected those arguments, with the final denial coming March 15.

Massachusetts then separately requested to have the NRC embark on a national rulemaking change. The deadline to file comments in support of their petition was March 19.

Sorrell joined six other attorneys general in a show of support. The letter had been circulated to all 50 attorneys general, but only Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont signed on.

“As you know, every nuclear power plant in the United States hosts a high-density fuel storage pool, and the inventory of spent fuel continues to mount without any clear prospect for removal and permanent disposal. Recent reports by the National Academy of Sciences, the NRC’s own technical staff and independent experts contradict the NRC’s assertion that high-density fuel storage pools pose no significant environmental risk,” the letter states. “Instead, these studies show that fuel storage pools are susceptible to fire and radiological release from a wide range of conditions, including natural phenomena, operator error, equipment failure, or intentional attack.”

The attorneys general contend in their letter that the environmental impacts of a fire in a spent fuel pool may extend over a larger area than a single state boundary, and may have an impact for decades.

“In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and other new and significant information, the NRC’s outdated conclusion - that fuel pool storage risks are insignificant - is no longer defensible,” the letter adds.

Late last year, the Ninth Circuit U.S Court of Appeals ruled that the NRC was responsible for addressing the impacts of an intentional attack. The ruling -which stems from a California case involving Pacific Gas & Electric - was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was rebuffed.

NRC officials disagree with the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation, and have said it does not apply in the Vermont Yankee case. That is what prompted Massachusetts to request a rulemaking change.

The NRC has refused to suspend the relicensure hearings while it takes up the rulemaking change. However, if the NRC were to change rules they could apply to the Vermont Yankee application and its generic environmental impact statement (GEIS).