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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."
Oh, this can 't be happening! You're operating without a T-437, Vermont!
Sweet mother of mercy!
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.
FTA:
The following week Vermont Yankee officials were accused of misleading state regulators and lawmakers by saying the plant did not have the type of underground pipes that could carry tritium.
Actually, I don't think they were misleading the regulators... It appears that they didn't have pipes that could carry the tritium. If only we could figure out why they were there in the first place.
Entergy is a power-production company
http://www.entergy.com/
who owns the place mr burns?
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
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
huh...thought it had something to do with walking trees
rewriting history since 2109
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.
no the bank will just make Lenny in charge of it.
If you've been following this story you'll see its always submitted with an inflammatory summary. The slashdot janitors are too lazy to read the actual story and fix the summary.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water_reactor
+ Stopped neutron.
I guess.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
What amazes me is their Senate voting to effectively shut down the source of over 1/3 of their power generation *before* they have even found a source to replace it.
Typical response from people with small minds. How about the MILLIONS in high paying jobs it dumps into the local economy? It isn't like these people are going to stay and work at Walmart for 8$ an hour if the plant closes. Vermont like Maine(which I moved to Florida from) is run by short sighted liberals who run on SMUG and fail to embrace reality.
I think perhaps GPP was a comment on the absurdity of corporate naming schemes. "We can't just be 'the power company,' we need a name that proactively maximizes stakeholder value by black-belt leveraging of core mission parameters ... I know! Entergy! It's like 'energy' but with a 't' for extra six-sigma network impact!"
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.
Don't underestimate the value of six-sigma network impact!!
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Nuclear power was the best idea of the last century but we now know of so many better and cheaper ways to safely generate stable and reliable power that to continue to pursue the old idea of nuclear energy is foolish. That toxic technology has killed thousands, rendered vast areas of Europe with toxic levels of radioactivity and has burdened thousands of future generations with the obligation of securing and maintaining the waste created by this idea whose time has passed.
The sooner that our governments move our energy production to safer and more reliable systems like geothermal, the better. Building up an entirely new and stable energy system based upon the vast heat resource under our feet would boost our economy out of the recession we are in while improving our security and safety through the complete dismantling of the toxic legacy of nuclear power generation.
Freeze in the dark for all I care you fucking hippies.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Entergy claims they have saved Vermonters $300 million over 8 years http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2010/02/26/leaking_credibility_vt_yankee_must_step_up_or_face_closure/ But they have also failed to contribute to the decommissioning fund required for all nuclear plants and the deficit seems to be just about that much. So really, what they have been doing is faking cheaper power to constrain competition in a dishonest manner.
Stodgy old protestant I'm afraid. I do get romanticized on slashdot which is a little uh, disturbing. I support nuclear power in naval propulsion applications but it is pretty clear that civilian nuclear power is a mistake. I have a fairly low acceptance-to-submission ratio for articles, around 0.16 last I checked.
A failure to proof read.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
and that's a failure to read the post below.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Entergy is hundreds of millions of dollars behind in its decommissioning fund for Vermont Yankee, more now that they have contaminated the site so badly: http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100201/NEWS02/2010362/1003/NEWS02 It is not cheap power, it is creative bookkeeping.
Someone has been fooled by the coal is radioactive propaganda.
I suggest reading my other post here or in fact anything at all which describes the events at TMI.
TMI was an example of fairly unique good initial safeguards put in place for other reasons and dumb luck saving us all from the complacency and stupidity that had set in prior to the accident. It was an example of what could happen which woke up the nuclear industry for a while and resulted in a lot of effort to prevent worse incidents from occurring.
Your post is an example of the sort of stupid complacency that led to the accident, but that's not a problem unless those responsible for implementing or even funding the safeguards believe this bullshit as well.
TMI was like sacking all the highly trained tiger keepers at a zoo and letting part of a fence rust away, and then the tiger not finding it's way out through a gap in the second fence before someone tracked down the keepers. There's no point pretending this stuff is safe, "clean", "too cheap to meter" or whatever - it requires adult supervision by people that take it seriously and not just PR. Pretending it's safe just leads to less expensive effort being put in to make it safe until the next thing that happens which scares a lot of people. TMI was the ideal accident since nobody died and the nuclear industry stopped taking stupid shortcuts for a long time. A lot of the US plants of that era were a lot more dangerous than Chenobyl, but they got shut down or upgraded after TMI.
It's not just a nuclear thing, the power industry, chemical industry and also large public works like highway bridges also suffers from this short term approach.
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."
Vermont Yankee is not a Heavy Water reactor, its a Boiling Water Reactor using Light Water.
Is this a follow up on the tritium scare engineered by some?
I summarize it by : OMG there's a tritium leak that make the water undrinkable by regulation, if you are dumb enough to dig a well under that power plant!
There are probably 1000s or enterprise leaking contaminated oil in the ground that are making water far more undrinkable than this, for years after the leak is gone. And those companies would be just as clueless to plug their leak. So why treat this differently?
Now, show me a major leak that has an impact and I'll agree with it. As it is, I am calling this whole campaign a troll.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
The 0.015% abundance of deuterium as one of the hydrogen atoms in H20 accounts for the tritium production in BWRs and PWRs.
People panic over this, but that is only because they are idiots. The leak at Vermont Yankee exceeded federal limits by 25% (2500 pCi/ml vs 2000 pCi/ml). Most nuclear plants get around the tritium issue by filtering their primary coolant, cleaning it up (except for tritium which can't be removed), and then discharging it. Gas systems (where hydrogen is used to scavenge for oxygen and reduce corrosion in the coolant) tend to build up a little higher tritium concentrations in PWRs because it is reused (especially if you can recycle it and swap between multiple reactors). I'm not a BWR expert, so I don't know how their waste gas systems work. But I assume they have some sort of gas stripping and hydrogen addition system to catch and store any fission product gasses in charcoal filters and decay tanks as well as reusing the hydrogen to scavenge for oxygen.
A concatenation of Entropy and Energy. It will cost a lot, slowly fall apart, and in the end go broke and leave you to clean up the mess.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
May all the bastards, including the idiot mdsolar who's just trying to hawk his solar panel snake oil, freeze to death.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Essentially the same point about cooling was rated interesting on another thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&cid=31279916
Because without them, plant operators would not spend a tenth of what they do on safety currently.
I've followed this story for many years nw, as I am a lifelong resident of Vermont, and I can't say I am surprised, but a LOT of the facts about this story are not being told here, or are misrepresented. /. is the story about how Entergy is trying to spin-off a subsidiary company called Enexus, and then sell the reactor (and all liability) to that company, wiping their hands clean of all responsibility. It is widely speculated that Enexus is over-leveraged and may not be able to afford the decommisioning costs (in the hundreds of millions, before any discovery of leaked tritium). VT certainly cannot saddle these costs if Entergy/Enexus leaves the burden to us.
First it Is important to know that the VT Legislature did not and can not rule on the safety aspects of the Vernon, VT reactor. Their ONLY area of concern is the reliabilty of the plant to provide base-load energy to the state. Vermont is unique in this way... No other state legislature has any role to play in determining the future of a nuclear reactor. The VT Legislature was given the role of assessing reliabilty of the reactor as part of the terms of sale when Entergy purchased the plant about a decade ago. The decision about the safety of the plant is the purview of the Public Service Board, which I believe is the norm nationwide.
Also important but seemingly ommitted here on
Yes, the Entergy officials did make misleading statements regarding buried pipes. Whether this was intentional or out of ignorance does not matter, really, in the eyes of Vermonters who no longer put much trust in the company that owns the plant. Because of this, many legislators and the Governor who once strongly supported the 20-year relicensing have changed their minds or have greatly reduced their support for a yes vote on the relicensing matter.
The Legislature voted on the reliability of the plant, which despite it's age has continued to score well on safety (I've heard it gets an A+, but I don't see how a letter-grade applies to such a broad concern). Perhaps the legislature was ALSO allowed to rule on the reliabilty of the company who owns the plant... That would certainly drag-down the plant's reliability assessment, in their eyes.
Finally, the "1/3 of the energy in VT" statement being bandied about is misleading. The reactor does generate the equivalent of 1/3 of VT's base-load, but I believe the amount of VT's power that comes from VT Yankee is 11%, as we get our power from a very diverse power portfolio. VT Yankee sells us what we need from them, and sells the rest to other states on the "NorthEast Grid." we probably get more energy from Hydro-Quebec's massive surplus, but I don't have the figures to know for sure.
This is a very touchy subject in VT right now. Rabid pro- and anti- nuclear power opinions are everywhere... I just about refuse to discuss the matter openly with friends and acquaintances these days. I hear LOTS of FUD regarding "skyrocketing power-costs" that are "certain" to come if the reactor is nt relicensed, but it seems unlikely it will actually put us in poverty. We've enjoyed low rates (~$.041/Kwh), but Entergy/Enexus is going to increase that to ~$.06/KWh if they do get relicensure in their new contract with the state. It is said that we can expect to meet that rate for the amount of energy we'll need to replace.
In the interests of full-disclosure, I personally would like to see VT get it's energy needs met elsewhere. There are a number of growing companies in the state that have a chance to supply "green-energy" if there was a demand. When the US is lagging far behind countries like China in the science and business of green energy, it makes sense from tecnological and economic viewpoint, not just environmental. Unfortunately, I expect the unique Legislatorial decision will be overturned by deep pockets and a lawsuit, and in the end corporate interests will end up sticking our small state with a cleanup bill that will be orders of magnitude greater than any accumulated energy cost savings to date. We will have to wait and see.
The Vermont Senate stayed away from the safety issue as that is NRC territory. What distressed many people was the costs of decommissioning and major distrust of the ability of the owner, Entergy, to finance shutting the plant down. Entergy has a plan to spin off its nuclear power plants to a debt-laden independent corporation. Unfortunately for Entergy, Verizon has just completed a spin-off of its land lines to Fairpoint Communications. Fairpoint took on heavy debt...and went bankrupt. We see the same thing as possible with the Entergy spin-off, except this time the rate-payers will pick up the costs. My rural electric cooperative sold its interest in nuclear generation a decade ago and will produce two-thirds of its power from the methane generated from our garbage.
Anti- or pro- or neutral, if we don't have the information, we can't do a rational risk assessment. When we see evidence of deceit, we can't assume that the person who's shown themselves to be deceitful in some cases is being forthright in other cases. We have to assume that they're being deceitful across the board. That sucks, because they probably are being forthright at least part of the time. But we have no way to tell which part.
To be pro-nuclear doesn't mean that you are pro-anything-nuclear. Ask someone from the nuclear navy how they feel about commercial nuclear power. You probably won't like the answer.
It's sad that you feel so entrenched in your opinion here that you have to assume that anybody who isn't pro-Vermont-Yankee is automatically anti-nuclear. Personally, I'd love to see some safe, well-managed nuclear reactors, preferably based on thorium rather than uranium, and with a sensible, believable plan for the fuel cycle and the plant lifecycle. But we don't have that, and we've never had that.
Nuclear plants should be designed to last forever. I don't mean without maintenance - I mean that the initial design should assume that every part will be replaced over the life of the plant, and should try to use the raw material from the parts as much as possible so that they don't just become a waste stream. This isn't rocket science, and while it's probably a bit more expensive at the start, I would expect it to be a lot less expensive in the long run, because you no longer have to save up for decommissioning, and of course you pay less for your waste stream.
Unfortunately, nobody's even talking about building plants like that.
This is pretty wrong. Yes, there is some contribution from deuterium activation but mainly it is burnable poisons in the fuel assembly and ternary fissions that produce tritium in BWRs. In PWRs boric acid in the coolant is even more important. http://meetings.lle.rochester.edu/Tritium/documents/3.ppt
Are plastic pipes rated for nuclear applications? http://www.timesargus.com/article/RH/20100227/NEWS04/2270342/0/NEWS02 Seems like weakening bonds with ionizing radiation in a hydrocarbon polymer might lead to oxidation and weakening of the material. Even UV seems to weaken it.
Nobody wants radioactive trees, or the hulking fern of doom.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.