The Vermont Yankee plant has been the site of scores of anti-nuclear protests since its opening in 1972. The closure leaves the United States with 99 operating reactors.
Arnie Gundersen talking:
it certainly is a victory for the Legislature in Vermont. You’ll remember that vote back in 2010 was 26 to four. It was pretty darn near unanimous to shut the plant down. Now, it took three years, but it was citizen pressure that got the state Senate to such a position, so my hat’s off to the citizens of Vermont for applying pressure to the Legislature for years, that culminated in this 26-to-4 vote.
The straw that broke the camel’s back is economics. You know, five nuclear plants have been shut down this year. We came into the year with 104, and now we’re at 99, and the year isn’t even over yet. These small single-unit nuclear plants, especially the ones that are like Fukushima Daiichi, are prone to more closures in the future, because it just makes no economic sense to run an aging nuclear plant that’s almost 43 years old and to invest hundreds of millions of dollars more to meet the modifications related to Fukushima Daiichi.
there’s a paper out by Dr. Mark Cooper at the Vermont Law School, and he predicts that as many as 30 nuclear plants are on the cusp of shutting down because of economic considerations. You know, a nuclear plant has 650 employees, as Governor Shumlin said, but the real comparison is against a comparable plant. A comparable plant of a fossil plant would have a hundred people. So the cost to keep a nuclear plant running is extraordinarily high. The nuclear fuel is not as expensive as coal or gas, but, in comparison, all the other costs are extraordinarily high. So there’s a lot of downward pressure on plants like Pilgrim, plants like Hope Creek and those in New Jersey that—Oyster Creek, that was hit by Sandy just six months ago. There’s a lot of cost pressures that likely will shut down, you know, another dozen nuclear plants before—before this all shakes out.
after the Legislature voted to—not to grant a license to continue until after 2012, Entergy had promised to reapply for a license to continue for the next 20 years. The Legislature, in that 26-to-4 vote, said, “No, we’re not going to allow you to reapply. It’s over. You know, a deal’s a deal. We had a 40-year deal.” Well, Entergy went to first the federal court here in Vermont and won, and then went to an appeals court in New York City and won again on the right—on the issue, as they framed it, that states have no authority to regulate safety. And they successfully argued that. But the position of the state was never about safety. You know, I was involved in the evaluations back in ’09 and 2010, and when we found safety problems on the panel that I was on, we immediately notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our goal was to look at the cost of Vermont Yankee and the reliability of Vermont Yankee as an aging plant. That got muddled up in the legal arguments, and Entergy prevailed. But I think by closing the plant, you know, ultimately Vermont prevailed anyway. It’s likely that that won’t get appealed to the Supreme Court, because when Entergy pulled the plug, the entire legal process has been mooted.
Japan’s nuclear regulator said today it has officially raised the severity rating of the latest radioactive water leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to Level 3 on an international scale for radiological releases. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said last week that 330 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from a storage tank at the facility.
that’s just one of—one of three problems that’s facing the Fukushima site. What this particular incident was, was one tank that had a thousand tons of radioactive liquid water in it when last they looked, and the next time they looked there was only 700 tons, and so 300 tons went missing. The surveys of the area determined that the radiation coming from the ground was five times more in an hour than a normal person would get in a year. So we’re talking about thousands of times more radioactive than the yearly exposure had leaked out of that tank. And that was the bases for the decision to call this a Level 3 accident—one leaky tank out of a tank farm of 700.
But there’s been more tanks leaking on that site than this particular one. This happens to be the single biggest and the highest radioactivity. But, really, there’s 700 tanks. There were some underground that were leaking. We have contaminated the underground water table with radioactive material from the tank farm, not just from this one tank, but from all the tanks that are on that site. And the problem is going to get worse. They’re building about a tank every other day. Fukushima Daiichi is generating something on the order of 400 tons of radioactive water every day. A tank only holds about a thousand tons, so, essentially, two or three tanks a week have to be built to stay on top of this inflow of water.
The other problem, the biggest problem, is that it’s continuing, that the radioactive water is leaking out of this plant as fast as it’s leaking in. So, you’ve got something on the order of 400 tons to maybe even as much as a thousand tons of water a day leaking off of the mountains around Fukushima into the basement of this plant. Well, the basement is highly radioactive, because the containment has failed and radioactive material is leaking out from the nuclear core into the other buildings. That’s being exposed to this clean groundwater and making it extraordinarily radioactive.
– source democracynow.org
Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry executive who has coordinated projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the country and now provides independent testimony on nuclear and radiation issues. He is the chief engineer at Fairewinds Associates.