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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
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.
You do realize that a more likely alternative is coal, a technology that produces more radioactivity, more toxic waste, and has killed far more people?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Someone has been fooled by the coal is radioactive propaganda.
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."
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
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.