Wednesday, February 24, 2010 5:30 PM
Vermont Deals A Blow To Nuclear Industry
By Margaret Kriz Hobson, NationalJournal.com
The nuclear power industry suffered an unusual setback today when the Vermont state Senate voted to close the state's only nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, after the plant's license expires in 2012. The Senate voted 26-4 to reject a request by the plant's owner, New Orleans-based Entergy, to renew the license for another 20 years. Under state law, either branch of the legislature has the authority to deny a nuclear plant license.
The 40-year-old Vermont Yankee has been at the center of controversy since radioactive tritium was recently discovered leaking from the plant's underground pipes into local groundwater. Although tritium is a carcinogen, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said the leak posed no immediate threat to public health. The plant suffered a similar leak in 2005, according to NRC regulators.
The vote to close Vermont Yankee comes at a time when the nuclear power industry's star is rising in Washington. The Obama administration recently awarded $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for Southern Co. to build two new nuclear plants. And in a Feb. 19 speech to Wall Street analysts, Nuclear Energy Institute president Marvin Fertel boasted that the industry has "nothing less than a new political mandate for nuclear energy."
But anti-nuclear groups argue that the Vermont Yankee case is evidence that the nuclear industry is overplaying its hand. "Vermonters sent a message to President Obama and the nuclear industry today," said Greenpeace nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio. "The nuclear renaissance is dead on arrival. We can retire old, decrepit and leaking reactors like Vermont Yankee and help usher in the energy revolution that America needs."
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