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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."
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
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.
Maybe, maybe not. I found this statement interesting:
To me that's kind of a lawyering statement where they're trying to get out of any legal repercussions by trying to be very precise about what they say they meant. I don't know the actual quote of what Entergy said to regulators, or the context in which they said it so it's hard to make any definitive analysis here. At this point I wouldn't give the company the benefit of the doubt though.
AccountKiller
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
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
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.
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?
Freeze in the dark for all I care you fucking hippies.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Three Mile Island is an example of how safe nuclear power is, NOT how dangerous it is.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You hit the nail on the head. I'm a life-long Vermonter. While there were a few eternal protesters about the plant during the last 20 years, by and large we were happy to have it. It makes a bunch of jobs, and provides a lot of power to the state at very competitive rates.
Fast forward to 2002 when Entergy took over, and nobody here is happy. They cranked the plant up to 120% of its designed output, as parts started to fail inspection. The decommissioning fund, which was based on the stock market, tanked. We won't be able to afford to decommission it until 2060 or so now. It will sit mothballed and hot until then.
All this was the lead-up for their petition to extend the operation of the plant 20 years beyond its initial license. It's scheduled to cease operation in 2012. They want to suck another 20 years of profit out of it. Of course, at 120% of the operating power, with parts still failing inspection, and without the money to decommission it. That's the framework for all the issues in the Senate. As has been well noted, they completely shot themselves in the foot with their inability to answer detailed questions about the plant to the Senate.
Vermont is a tiny state. It has the 2nd smallest population in the US. Probably a majority of towns have populations in the thousands. The biggest city is about 60k. When we vote people into state government positions, they are our friends, neighbors, and relatives. They are not some nameless face we saw on a poster. We've done business with them, drank a beer with them, shook their hand and looked them in the eye. Because of that, our state legislators do NOT screw around much. If something is going to be bad for their community, it gets shut down. If you screw over the 4,000 people in your town, you're probably going to have to move.
Because of this climate, Entergy can't get away with lying to the senate then writing a bunch of checks to cover the issues. They were asked point blank if they had any buried pipes. The answer was, "not that we know of". A year later, and buried pipes are leaking tritium into the ground water. When pressed, they answered, "Oh, well we define "buried" as encased in dirt, and carrying liquid. If it's underground, but encased in concrete, and carrying vapor, it's not considered "buried".
As I said, our legislators don't screw around. They got that sort of response from a company that we've steadily lost trust in, and the end result is that we're denying their 20 year extension to operate.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor