"Vermont nuclear power plant to close in 2014; Energy prices spell the end" by David Abel and Erin Ailworth | Globe Staff, August 28, 2013
The owner of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant said Tuesday it would shutter the controversial facility by the end of next year, putting hundreds of employees out of work, about a third of them from Massachusetts, and raising questions about the future of the region’s other nuclear plants.
Aww. The can join millions of their fellow citizens for a good cause.
The plant has withstood years of legal battles with the state and persistent protests about its safety, but in the end, officials at Entergy Corp. said they decided to close the aging reactor along the Connecticut River because of economics. A steep drop in natural gas prices in recent years led to plummeting wholesale electricity prices. That loss of revenue, as well as increased costs to comply with new federal and regional regulations, made it difficult to run the plant at a profit.
“This was an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us,” Leo Denault, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
The announcement was surprising, as it came just weeks after Entergy won a federal court ruling invalidating efforts by the Vermont Legislature to close the plant. Entergy officials said the decision to close the plant in Vernon, near the border with Massachusetts, was not influenced by political pressure or the recent court decision.
*********************************
Vermont Yankee is the fifth reactor whose retirement has been announced this year, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the number of nuclear plants in the United States will be reduced to 99 by next year.
The viability of nuclear power has been under siege for some time, as hydraulic fracturing has slashed natural gas prices. The controversial drilling technique, called fracking, has unlocked vast domestic gas resources in shale rock formations.
It may just be fool's gold, folks.
The increasing use of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, which qualify for tax credits and other incentives that lower their prices compared to nuclear power, has also played a part.
Waiting to see what Washington will $ay.
“Nuclear power is in big trouble economically,” said Henry Lee, director of the environment and natural resources program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Entergy’s announcement brought cheers from Vermont lawmakers and environmental advocates, many of whom have been seeking for decades to close the 41-year-old plant.
“This is the right decision for Vermont and the right decision for Vermont’s energy future,” Governor Peter Shumlin said at a press conference at his office in Montpelier.
And me. I live within the evacuation zone.
He likened the plant’s closure to a military base leaving the state. “My heart goes out to the hard-working employees,” he said.
Oh, right, I forgot that we have to wor$hip at the altar.
Bill Mohl, who oversees all of Entergy’s nuclear plants in the Northeast, said that all 630 Vermont Yankee employees could ultimately lose their jobs, though some of them will remain on staff during the many years it will take to decommission the plant. As many as 250 of the employees are from Massachusetts, according to the state Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.
Well, the economic recovery I keep hearing about should easily absorb them.
***************************
Mohl, president of Entergy Wholesale Commodities, said the company has no plans to shutter Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., which shares a similar design with Vermont Yankee. Both have Mark 1 boiling water reactors like those at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan, where radiation leaked after a massive earthquake and tsunami two years ago, prompting new safety requirements at US plants.
Related: Finishing Friday With Fukushima
If that (and the subsequent lack of coverage) doesn't convince you to scrap nuclear power nothing will. The Pacific has been ruined as a food source, folks.
Mohl said Entergy plans to spend about $500 million on safety upgrades at its nuclear plants over coming years. Closing Vermont Yankee will save the company about $50 million on complying with the new regulations, he said.
“We constantly evaluate all of our assets, but I can assure you we have not made any decision to shut Pilgrim down,” Mohl said, noting that Pilgrim is a larger facility that produces about 10 percent more power than Vermont Yankee.
This post is a bit of a Pilgrimage below.
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The company has two years from the date the reactor shuts down, expected in the final three months of 2014, to deliver a decommissioning plan to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Entergy will have 60 years to dismantle buildings, drain reactor pools, and contain spent fuel in cylinders reinforced with steel and concrete.
But state and company officials said they hope the work will be done in less than a decade.
Entergy officials said they intend to seal the plant and wait until some of the radioactivity declines and until there is more growth in the decommissioning trust fund....
It's like 20 miles away!
Mohl said it is likely the radioactive waste will be buried at a repository in Texas....
I'm sure they love having that stuff around down there. Sorry you have to take our radioactive $hit, Texas.
Also see: Obama's Alphabet Scandals: The Nuclear Option
Impeachable!
He said it was not clear whether Vermont Yankee’s closure was a harbinger for other nuclear plants. While there are five new reactors under construction in the United States, the number of reactors has fallen from a peak of 111 in the early 1990s, Sheehan said. Plants have closed both because of economic pressures and safety problems as they aged.
Lee, at Harvard, said the loss of Vermont Yankee would not have a significant impact on electricity availability in the region, noting the plant supplies a small percentage of the power that goes into the regional power grid.
Then it hardly seems worth the risk.
Still, the plant’s shutdown raises other concerns, increasing the region’s dependence on natural gas, said Ellen Foley, spokeswoman for the grid operator, ISO New England. “We have identified that as a risk.”
Natural gas now accounts for more than half the region’s net electricity generation, while nuclear plants produced a bit more than a quarter of the power last year.
Some said the plant’s retirement could push up electricity prices.
I'm $ure $ome will u$e it to line pockets.
Grid officials “seem to think that they have enough power that the lights won’t go out, but it’s not going to be cheap,” said James Hewlett, an economist who deals with nuclear issues for the US Energy Information Administration.
Others were skeptical that consumers will pay more.
“Vermont Yankee will go away, and no one will notice,” said Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School. “There are other resources.”
Environmental advocates said the plant’s closure will make way for renewable energy projects in Vermont.
“The state has been saddled with this poorly managed, uneconomic dinosaur for far too long, enduring environmental damage and the persistent threats to public health and safety that come with operating a nuclear power plant well beyond its planned life,” said Sandra Levine, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation in Montpelier.
They finally get around to mentioning the environment and public safety through a controlled-oppo$ition, agenda-pu$hing mouthpiece. Other than that the concern and focus is mostly bu$ine$$.
The question many in the region are now asking is whether other plants will follow Vermont Yankee’s path, including Seabrook in New Hampshire and Indian Point in New York. How they fare depends on natural gas and wholesale electricity prices, the structure of electricity markets, and the addition of alternative energy resources. Seabrook, commissioned in 1990, is roughly half as old as the Vermont plant, and also much bigger.
Given the unfavorable market conditions for nuclear power, New England Power Generators Association president Dan Dolan wonders how the other plants will survive.
“Who’s next?” he said.
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And with global warming turning to fart mist the need for nuclear is even le$$:
"In shadow of plant, small town’s future in jeopardy" by Carolyn Y. Johnson | Globe Staff, August 28, 2013
VERNON, Vt. — By early afternoon Tuesday, Nesbitt’s Portside Tavern was crammed with workers from the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The dirt parking lot was filled to capacity, and the main road was clogged with cars parked on the shoulder.
Hours earlier, the workers had been told the plant would close next year, an announcement few expected. Released early for the day, they stopped at the restaurant and pub on the banks of the Connecticut River to sip beers and talk about the future.
They politely turned away when a reporter approached, but Don Rosinski, a Vernon resident who does not work at the plant, said the closure would have huge ripple effects. Everybody in the small town knows someone who works at Vermont Yankee.
“Just in my neighborhood alone, there are six families,” Rosinski said. “One just sent their third kid to college. The timing is very bad. The problem with Vermont is it’s a beautiful place to live, and there’s no way to make a living.”
I feel bad for them, but I'm not in charge of the banking system or the corporate business models that destroyed all that. Other than that, I don't want that cancer-causing plant with possible catastrophe written all over it active. Just a slight survival instinct thing, that's all.
Vernon is a small town of about 2,200 people, too small to need a traffic light, where bumper stickers read: “Go Green Go Nuclear” and “Vermont Yankee Vital to VT.”
I know where it is, I have driven through it many times.
A little more than half of its tax revenues, $1.3 million, comes directly from the plant. Patty O’Donnell, chairwoman of the town’s selectboard, said that 45 households include plant employees, and that about 40 percent of the workers live in Vermont.
“I think the town right now is just in shock,” she said. “At the end of the day, we had 632 people working at that plant that were strong community members. Vermont Yankee employs a lot of Vermonters who’ve been Vermonters for generations.”
Well, it won't be right away and all at once.
Although the plant has been steeped in controversy for years, O’Donnell said that support for Vermont Yankee has always been overwhelming in Vernon. The plant was by far the largest employer, and it provided some of the highest-paid jobs in the state.
At what cost?
O’Donnell said the closure would also affect businesses and subcontractors supported by the plant; she knows a plumber who gets a large part of his work from the company.
“It’s going to be a ghost town after that closes, I’ll say,” said Jack Emery, who has lived in town for 87 years.
It is $uch a bu$ine$$ oriented paper.
At least one resident expressed relief. Maynard Beswick, 62, who was stopping in the town offices while walking his dog, said that after the earthquake in Japan two years ago and the ensuing problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, he has been worried about the safety of the Vernon plant.
“I’m glad it is going to be closed,” Beswick said. “I think it’s been in operation too long, like anything, like an automobile that deteriorates over time.”
Sounds like a nice enough guy, but I don't call it a jewspaper for no good reason.
In nearby Brattleboro, the news was welcomed by many.
Elise Gunzburg, sitting at the café at the Brattleboro Food Co-op, said she and her partner bought a house in nearby Hinsdale more than three decades ago, only to learn the night they moved in that there was a nuclear plant so close they could see it from the house.
The stereotypes and supremacism are toxic!
Alarmed, but unsure of what to do, she decided to unplug from the grid. For years, she filled buckets at a well and carried them to her house to flush her toilet and wash her dishes. Now she lives in Guilford and has founded a center for sustainable living skills.
I kind of like plumbing; I just wish the authorities had maintained the infrastructure.
“It’s totally shaped my life,” Gunzburg said. “Living off the grid was my form of activism.”
It probably is a good idea, but then the state starts ha$$ling you and the lo$$ of living standard while the ob$cenely wealthy phatten themselves even more is humbling.
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Also see: Vt. GOP leader hits Democrats over nuclear plant
$ee?
Meanwhile, up in Maine:
"Its nuclear plant shut, Maine town full of regret; Wiscasset, Maine, long in economic depths" by David Abel | Globe Staff, September 18, 2013
WISCASSET, Maine — In a wooded area behind a camouflage-clad guard holding an assault rifle, dozens of hulking casks packed with radioactive waste rest on concrete pads — relics of the shuttered nuclear plant that once powered the region and made this fishing town feel rich.
In the 17 years since Maine Yankee began dismantling its reactors and shedding its 600 workers, this small, coastal town north of Portland has experienced drastic changes: property taxes have spiked by more than 10 times for the town’s 3,700 residents, the number living in poverty has more than doubled as many professionals left, and town services and jobs have been cut.
“I have yet to meet anyone happy that Maine Yankee is gone,” said Laurie Smith, the town manager. “All these years later, we’re still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.”
Okay, I got it, me$$age received loud and clear.
Such words are a caution to residents of Vernon, Vt., home of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station. The owner of the 41-year-old nuclear plant last month shocked its 630 employees — about a third from Massachusetts — by announcing it is closing.
Activists opposed to nuclear energy have long opposed the region’s plants, raising safety concerns that peaked two years ago after the tsunami in Japan caused a series of meltdowns at reactors there. But the New England plants have been economic boons for the small towns where they were built — as long as they remain open.
The residents of Vernon now face mass unemployment and the loss of about half the town’s tax revenues. Compounding their challenges will be the difficulty of doing anything with the valuable property.
Like at other nuclear plants shuttered in the region, such as Connecticut Yankee in Haddam and Yankee Rowe in Northwestern Massachusetts, the radioactive waste must remain on the property until the federal government finds a suitable location to store the spent fuel. That could take decades as politicians have feuded for years about where to store the waste permanently and strict federal regulations require a security cordon around the property.
I was told it was going to Texas!
“We’re all in the same position: We want to go out of business,” said Eric Howes, a spokesman for Maine Yankee, which retains a small staff to maintain its 64 casks of radioactive waste, each of which weighs more than 300,000 pounds, emits temperatures of up to 114 degrees, and releases small amounts of radiation into the air. “The land could be reused for other purposes, but as long as the fuel is there, it can’t be used for anything.”
The plant in Rowe, Mass., which cost more than $600 million over 15 years to decommission, also left a path of woe for the town’s 280 residents when it closed in 1992. The plant had nearly as many employees as the town had residents and local companies suffered from the loss of business.
It's the $ame with other $pecial intere$ts that dominate my pre$$ like the military, so let's just keep going down this self-destructive path until final implosion.
Wiscasset officials would relish the opportunity to redevelop the Maine Yankee property and bring in a new employer. The plant, which paid for 96 percent of the town’s budget until 1996, remains the largest payer of property taxes — providing about 10 percent of the town’s $10 million budget. But residents are still coping with their abrupt plummet in wealth and their lingering expectations of extensive services.
The town lacks money to repair leaky windows and roofs in school buildings.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Afghan Classroom
And we are still sending them $8 billion a year for development and infrastructure.
I gue$$ we have no other choice, huh?
The high school has fewer than half the students it had two decades ago, and about 50 percent of them rely on subsidized lunches.
And school lunches suck.
Sewer and utility services are no longer free and residents reminisce about how they once indulged in amenities such as a ladder truck for their fire department, even though the town lacks buildings taller than three stories.
Get u$ed to it, America, because all the loot has been stolen and it is never coming back. Some people think it is funny.
Using an average of data collected between 2006 and 2010, the US Census American Community Survey found that more than 33 percent of Wiscasset residents were living in poverty, more than double the percentage found in the 2000 US Census. Wiscasset ranked as the fourth-poorest community in Maine.
To the throngs of summer tourists who pass through on Route 1, the downtown seems prosperous. But on a recent afternoon at one of the many lobster shacks in town, Tony True recalled working a contracting job on a steam generator at the plant when the company announced it was closing. Everyone around him walked out.
“It became a ghost town,” said True, 51, who has lived in Wiscasset most of his life.
Like others in town, he remains angry that the 900-megawatt reactor closed after a quarter-century of generating electricity, a process that took nine years and cost $568 million. (Officials at the plant, which is owned by a consortium of utility companies in New England, blamed the difficult economics of running the plant, which had maintenance issues and required expensive work, a similar explanation provided by officials at Vermont Yankee.)
They should operate it at a loss then!
True’s property taxes, which used to run $180 annually, now exceed $4,000 a year. He laments the state of the schools and the animosity that arises every year over the town’s meager budget.
“I wish Maine Yankee never came here,” he said. “We went from having anything we wanted to having nothing, like going from being spoiled children to having no parents. The closing really put a curtain on Wiscasset.”
And who knows what they did to the environment. Anybody you know get cancer?
Sue Thompson, who has lived in the town all her life, has seen the sharp plunge in everything from road maintenance to sports championships at the high school.
Many of her friends left town for jobs elsewhere and she complains about the high cost of trash pickup, which used to be free, and the lack of public works staff to shovel sidewalks. But she’s one of the few residents who sees a benefit from the plant’s closing.
“Most of my family died of cancer, and I think the plant was the reason,” said Thompson, 55, a cashier at a fireworks shop.
Ah! That's not really that important judging by the placement in my paper.
Howes, the plant spokesman, said it operated safely. Most other residents interviewed in town said they rarely worried about the plant’s safety and have few concerns about the remaining radioactive waste.
Proving Vermonters can be as stoopid as any stereotyped southern backwater.
But the plant faced serious allegations of safety violations and falsifying records around the time it was closed, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Oh, NO KIDDING!
Agency investigators found Maine Yankee relied on inadequate computer analyses to demonstrate the adequacy of its emergency core cooling system; “willfully provided inaccurate information” to the NRC about its ability to vent steam during an accident; and provided falsified records of safety-related equipment.
Seems kind of important; in fact, that LAST PART seems CRIMINAL!
“Many of these violations and underlying causes were longstanding and appeared to be caused by ineffective engineering analyses,” NRC officials wrote to Maine Yankee shortly after the plant closed.
They added that Maine Yankee “was a facility in which pressure to be a low-cost performer led to practices which over-relied on judgment, discouraged problem reporting, and accepted low standards of performance.”
I would be concerned now.
Ashley Dowdy and her four young boys recently moved about a half-mile from where the casks are stored and can see the plant’s remaining administrative buildings from their house.
“We never worry about it,” said Dowdy, 25, who grew up in Wiscasset. She remembers using outdated textbooks and how the high school sports program went from upgrading equipment and uniforms every year to abandoning many of its teams.
High school principal Deb Taylor remembered when teachers routinely took students on field trips and the staff had generous health insurance. Now, field trips are rare and the school requires teachers to take their spouse’s health insurance.
“We’re an entirely different school and community than we were in the time of Maine Yankee,” Taylor said. “We have a student population with greater need and we have less ability to meet that need.”
The gulf between the past and present, as well as the nostalgia, has made the challenge greater.
“We face our issues still living under the perception that we are a wealthy place,” she said. “There’s a mismatch in who we feel we’re supposed to be and our current reality.”
That's the perception the propaganda pre$$ promotes about AmeriKa.
At town hall, Selectwoman Judy Colby ticked off vestiges of Wiscasset’s bygone wealth: seven gleaming fire engines, two state-of-the-art ambulances, a prized community recreation center, three modern piers, sewer and water lines that reach the most rural parts of town, and cable television available in every home.
But they now all come with a hefty price.
“It’s now a real struggle for a lot of families to pay their taxes,” said Colby, whose annual tax bill spiked from $289 for 50 acres of land in 1996 to about $5,000 for 48 acres now. “People still want all the amenities, but they’re finding it very hard to pay for them.”
Hey, banks and corporations are making record profits so what is the problem?
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Nothing about cancer-causing elements leaking into Conn. River!
Also see: Nuclear power plays a diminishing role in mix
Good.
"Governor questions Vermont Yankee radiation monitors
Governor Peter Shumlin’s administration has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for information about malfunctioning radiation monitors at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. The plant’s owner said radiation monitors produced false signals but did not fail. Darren Springer, deputy commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, sent a letter to the NRC questioning the 60-day period allowed for Entergy to file a report. Springer said ‘‘failure of the radiation monitoring equipment is a serious issue.’’ Entergy spokesman Robert Williams told the Rutland Herald that the radiation monitors performed their proper function in controlling ventilation of the reactor building. Nonetheless, he said Entergy decided as a precaution to replace the four monitors. The false signals showed high radiation levels in the primary containment isolation system. Workers confirmed that radiation levels were normal."
Just radiates cover-up since they were already caught lying a couple of times.
Just radiates cover-up since they were already caught lying a couple of times.
Back in Massachusetts:
"Service returns to Pilgrim as questions linger" by Erin Ailworth | Globe Staff, January 24, 2013
"Service returns to Pilgrim as questions linger" by Erin Ailworth | Globe Staff, January 24, 2013
Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth returned to service Wednesday following its seventh outage or other unexpected problem in two years, prompting critics to question whether there are larger issues at the plant.
The plant was shut down Monday after workers found a leak in a safety valve; earlier in January Pilgrim went offline for six days when recirculation pumps used to adjust power levels stopped working.
Despite the outages, federal regulators said there have not been enough incidents to warrant additional oversight of Pilgrim....
Not until something really bad happens.
Not until something really bad happens.
"Action urged on nuclear waste storage" by Joshua Miller | Globe Staff, May 28, 2013
Two top Massachusetts officials on Friday called on the federal government to fulfill its obligation to dispose of spent nuclear fuel stored in the Commonwealth and around the country.
State attorney general Martha Coakley and state Senate president Therese Murray on Friday sent a letter to a bipartisan group of US senators, calling on them to pass a piece of legislation that would, among other actions, create a new federal Nuclear Waste Administration and move toward the creation of a long-stalled permanent storage facility for high-level nuclear waste.
As I noted above the president is defying that law.
There is no central federal facility for very radioactive nuclear waste, such as spent fuel from commercial power plants. That means the waste is usually stored on the site of the power plant where the fuel was used, including plants in New England, such as Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth.
As I noted above the president is defying that law.
There is no central federal facility for very radioactive nuclear waste, such as spent fuel from commercial power plants. That means the waste is usually stored on the site of the power plant where the fuel was used, including plants in New England, such as Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth.
Murray and Coakley, both of whom have expressed concern about Pilgrim’s stored nuclear waste over the years, sent the letter in support of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013.
“This legislation will establish long-needed procedures to move this waste to a permanent offsite location and ensure the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment,” said Murray, a Plymouth resident, in a statement. It is “the responsibility of our Congress to act quickly on this matter.”
“This is a public safety issue,” Coakley said in a statement, “and the federal government has an obligation to act.”
Murray and Coakley said in the letter that when Pilgrim and other reactors were licensed by the federal government in the 1970s, “regulators assumed that the spent fuel would be transferred offsite to a permanent disposal facility. More than 40 years later, a permanent repository still has not been constructed.”
In a phone interview Monday evening, Coakley said the government’s delay was irksome and it was long past time for the federal government to finally make a substantive move on resolving this issue.
“It is frustrating. And I know that the Senate president, with Plymouth in her district, lives with this,” Coakley said. “This is not an abstract problem for many people in Massachusetts.”
In the letter, Murray and Coakley make the case that spent fuel on the sites of nuclear plants is not as safe as it would be in a central repository.
Carol Wightman, a spokeswoman for Pilgrim, agreed that the federal government has an obligation to take spent fuel. “We support a single repository for spent fuel,” she said.
But, Wightman said, the temporary storage mechanisms in place at Pilgrim are safe.
Since the 1980s, the US government has planned to create a central repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But that project, opposed by President Obama and US Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, is essentially stalled, probably permanently.
The draft legislation supported by Murray and Coakley would create an agency to pick a new permanent storage site and, in the interim, come up with temporary storage facilities for nuclear waste.
“This specific bill doesn’t solve all the problems,” Coakley said in the interview, “but we felt it was good place to start.”
This is a good place to end.
This is a good place to end.
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Related: Conn., Mass., Maine nuke plants win fed payments
Yeah, don't mind the nuclear waste and fuel rods being stored on site while the worsening situation at Fukushima has disappeared down the memory hole again.
Related: Conn., Mass., Maine nuke plants win fed payments
Yeah, don't mind the nuclear waste and fuel rods being stored on site while the worsening situation at Fukushima has disappeared down the memory hole again.
