BRATTLEBORO — Vermont Yankee has a new ad campaign: “When it comes to safety, it's time to let the facts speak for themselves.”
We're told that Vermont Yankee has been safely providing electricity for 39 years, that safety and security systems are operational at all times, that personnel receive safety training, and that two NRC inspectors work on site.
So far, so good. But here are some other safety-related facts:
Fact: Vermont Yankee uses a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor with Mark I, the same model of containment that is currently melting down at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, an evolving catastrophe now on a par with Chernobyl.
Fact: A reactor's containment is designed to be a barrier to the release of radioactivity generated during operations.
It's been known for almost 50 years that the Mark I containment structure is not likely to survive a meltdown of the reactor core. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not require containment to remain intact during such a meltdown.
Fact: Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee is running its reactor at 120 percent of the plant's original design capacity. Vermont Yankee uses nuclear fission to split uranium-235 atoms to boil water to make steam to turn turbines. The boiling of water can surely be accomplished by safer means.
Fact: In 2010, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists annual report, there were 14 “near-misses” at U.S. nuclear power plants. These occurred because plant owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems. One safety issue at Vermont Yankee is the underground cables that might not stand up to submersion in water.
Fact: Vermont Yankee routinely releases low-level radiation into the environment.
Even the tiniest amount of radiation cannot be considered safe. This doesn't mean that people will drop dead on the spot; cancers can take many years to develop.
You can bet that the industry will argue that deaths could be attributed to eating bananas.
Some radiation is released from Vermont Yankee's stack just north of the reactor building. Others, like tritium, escape from underground pipes (the ones we were officially assured didn't exist) into the groundwater, a public resource.
Fact: Vermont Yankee's “spent” fuel pool - an irradiated fuel pool - sits within the reactor building about 70 feet in the air under a sheet-metal roof. Nevertheless, the NRC calls nuclear power plants among the most robust structures built by man. Would it be safe to assume, then, that Vermont Yankee's reactor building roof can repel a crashing airliner?
Fact: Vermont Yankee's spent-fuel pool was originally licensed to hold 600 irradiated nuclear fuel canisters. It now holds approximately 3,000 - many more than are held in the fuel pools at the Fukushima reactors.
Fuel rods removed from the reactor core are intensely radioactive, about a million times more radioactive than when loaded into the core. Vermont Yankee's spent-fuel pool at one point contained 35 million curies of cesium.
By comparison, the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 released about 1 million curies.
Returning Vermont Yankee's fuel pool to a safer number of canisters would require placing much of the spent fuel into dry casks at about $1.5 million per copy. This would clearly eat into Entergy's bottom line, and so isn't likely to happen.
And, by the way, a Vermont Yankee web site assures us that dry-cask storage is safe and capable of resisting “fire, floods, tornadoes, missiles, earthquakes, and even a direct hit from a large aircraft, without releasing radiation.”
Presumably, this even holds true when the casks are out in the open, as five of them now are, protected by a 20-foot-high wooden fence on one side.
Fact: If Vermont Yankee's spent-fuel pool loses its cooling water, a zirconium fire would melt down the fuel rods and release disastrous amounts of radiation into the air, water, and soil. An area of many hundreds of square miles could be rendered uninhabitable.
Many people in the local tri-state area would be out of luck. The Vermont brand, including maple sugaring, local agriculture, and ski and tourist industries, would become worthless.
Brattleboro's vibrant art, music, and literary scenes would be obliterated. Our families, friends, and neighbors would suffer and perish from radiation poisoning.
Fact: Vermont Yankee's operation, from uranium mining, to enrichment, to fissioning, to storage of spent fuel produces some nasty products.
Enrichment produces depleted uranium (DU), with a radiological half-life of 4.5 billion years. DU is used by the military. When a DU munition explodes, it results in a chemically toxic and radioactive dust that cannot be cleaned up, that gets into soil and water, that follows wind currents around the world, and that causes birth deformities and other abominations to any living thing.
Irradiated fuel contains plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,000 years, and dangerous for 250,000 years (12,000 human generations). Plutonium is useful for making nuclear bombs, in case we need any more than the thousands we already have, many still on hair-trigger alert from Cold War days.
Vermont Yankee's irradiated fuel and high level nuclear waste will be deadly for a million years. Six decades into the atomic era, there is still no safe way to dispose of it. So why are we making more, with or without safety inspectors on duty?
The time has come to stop believing the nuclear hype from Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee, the NRC, and the nuclear-industrial-congressional-presidential complex.
Vermont does not need Vermont Yankee. Its electricity equals only 2 percent of the New England grid. Let's make sure that Vermont Yankee retires on schedule on March 21, 2012. It's time to put the welfare of people and the planet ahead of corporate profit.
Let us ensure that history never has to add Vermont Yankee to a list of nuclear tragedies that includes Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011.
Let us focus our efforts on energy conservation and energy efficiency. Let us promote renewable energies such as hydro, wind, solar, methane, biomass, and geothermal. None of these require evacuation plans or costly decommissioning. None would tempt a terrorist attack. And none would produce material that will be deadly for a million years.
Vermont Yankee ads can proclaim all the self-serving safety facts they want, but we don't have to fall for it. There are many other facts about safety that should be speaking to us.