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Vermont May Revoke Nuclear Plant License
mdsolar writes "Following the Vermont Senate's 26-to-4 vote not to approve a 20-year license extension for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the Vermont Public Service Board will consider revoking its operating license as well. Meanwhile, the plant continues to operate without its Director of Nuclear Safety Assurance, who has been placed on administrative leave; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full complement of safety personnel. It may be that the NRC is not capable of doing what is needed with regard to Entergy, the plant owner, which is also facing prosecution by the Mississippi Attorney General."
One of the issues with shutting down Vermont Yankee is that it provides over a third of the electricity to the state. I feel like a lot of the reason it has been treated so leniently is because of the massive increase in price Vermonters face in getting power elsewhere in that kind of volume. Hydro-Quebec provides a good portion of the rest, perhaps they have the capacity, but there's nothing quite like homegrown cheap power.
Entergy is a power-production company
http://www.entergy.com/
Heh, not sure if you were being sarcastic or not. But although I support nuclear power, maintaining long-term credibility and safety does require regulation, and action to follow through when the regulations are not met. Nothing could discredit the nuclear industry more than letting things slide. (The fact nobody thinks to make any long-term changes every time another couple dozen coal miners are buried alive is a separate issue...)
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant. AFAICS, Entergy is not capable of safely operating a coffee maker, much less a 600MW nuclear reactor.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Give me a break. If you strip away the inflammatory wording, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
The NRC "merely" did something reasonable rather than taking some draconian action that the fossil fuel industry apologists could then use to argue against the safety and reliability of their biggest competitor ("Look! They had to shut it down for safety violations! Oh Noooooooo!")
-- MarkusQ
It's presumably the same thing that drives the different approaches to safety between passenger cars and passenger aircraft.
Stalin said "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
However, from the perspective of the news media, "The death of one man is an obituary, the death of millions is a long-running and frankly rather tedious investigative series on page A15, and the deaths of a few hundred all at once is days of front page stories with large pictures"....
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel
What's bizarre about the whole thing is the level of radiation leaks that started all this trouble weren't even that high, near the level we can measure accurately. There was no need to lie, unless they were trying to cover up something even bigger. They could have owned up to their troubles and fixed most of what was wrong and probably stayed out of trouble.
Now they're screwed. After the NRC proctological exam, they probably will get shut down. Of course, with all the protections the Supreme Court gives artificial corporate people, you can be sure no one will actually be held accountable.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Okay, so the company suspended the safety director only four days ago, and the submitter is bitching about "lack of full complement of safety personnel", and implying that the plant should be shut down? Give me a fucking break. He has assistants and subordinates that can fill in for him until a replacement is chosen. It's not like he never took vacation or was away from the plant during the time he was working there.
This is a serious situation and needs to be looked into closely, especially given the deceit on behalf of Entergy. I agree that long-term license renewal should not be granted until they agree to additional oversight and put forth concrete plans for resolving the maintenance problems that currently exist. However, the plant is not unsafe at this time, the problems can be fixed, and there is no reason that it shouldn't be.
Seriously, mdsolar, just STFU. It is people like you that make me ashamed to be associate with environmental groups at all.
There's 20 years of Simsons episodes. Some people have better things to do than memorize hundreds of hours of Simpsons dialogue. Heck there's probably Slashdot readers these days that are younger than the show.
Do you just stop reading when you hit a word you don't understand? Because the three words after "Entergy" tell you "What the hell" it is.
"Entergy, the plant owner,"
What I don't get about this whole situation is why the NRC doesn't bring someone in (either an NRC employee, or maybe a qualified consultant) to be the Acting Director of Safety? Doesn't the NRC have anybody qualified to take over operations of Nuclear Plants when necessary? If Entergy can't run the plant safely, bring in someone who can (at least temporarily, until the 'permanent disposition' of the situation can be sorted out). If Entergy really did something bad, perhaps they should be forcibly divested of their ownership of the plant (probably with some partial compensation, but perhaps not complete compensation, as a punitive measure), and the plant sold to a company who has a track record for running nuclear plants safely?
I'm sure none of the Vermont legislators wants to appear to be taking the safety of Vermont residents 'lightly', so they are rushing to this idea of permanently shutting down the power plant. I do agree that something needs to be done, but shutting down a plant which just needs some repairs (and possibly retrofitting some 'safety upgrades') seems like an irrational, knee-jerk reaction.
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant.
It's not hard at all. Read some of the other comments to this story and you'll see it's quite easy for some people. There's a crowd that, any time any safety issue relating to any nuclear plant is mentioned, react with howls of "OMG the liberal socialist greenies want to take our clean safe never-has-any-kind-of-problem-EVAR nuclear power away!!!" They're pretty much the other side of the same coin as the "nuclear power is dangerous 'cause it's got atoms in it!!!" types, and just as ignorant.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
mdsolar is promoting:
1) his lame political affiliation and
2) his business "renting" solar solutions
Can you spell opportunist a-la Al Gore?
Millions dumped into the local economy aren't worth much if the entire area is rendered uninhabitable by a serious radiation leak. That's just hell on property values, whether you are a smug liberal or a stingy reactionary. Yes, it sucks that if this sticks, a bunch of people will lose their jobs. No argument from me. But the decision was taken as a result of some very bad behavior on the part of Entergy officials. If these people screw up badly, we all (that is, all of us who live in the area) lose in a very big way. So if we can't trust them, it really doesn't matter whether or not the plant is actually safe: we can't *tell* whether or not it's safe, and so we have to assume it's not.
Just shut it down and let the lights go out in Vermont.
Oh, and how much extra mid-east oil will we import to make up for that clean, carbon neutral power? Enquiring minds want to know.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in US history. It caused no immediate deaths and released an amount of radiation which, statistically, is probably responsible for one death.
Worst nuclear disaster. One death.
Meanwhile, literally thousands of people die in coal plant-related accidents every year, with an estimated tens of thousands dying every year from the pollution released.
Safety is not an absolute - it is relative to the alternatives - and by that measure, nuclear power is ridiculously safe.
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