The date “March 21, 2012” rings with an emotional resonance in Windham County to people on both sides of the issue of whether Vermont Yankee should continue operating.
As the last day of the plant's first 40 years of operation looms closer, even the most diehard antinuclear activists have conceded the likelihood that the plant will remain open despite a cornucopia of issues that remain under the state's jurisdiction.
That doesn't mean that those opposing the plant have accepted the circumstances.
In the rainy gloom on the morning of March 3, a few students in their teens and early 20s gather on the slushy sidewalk next to the town common in Greenfield, Mass., as they prepare to walk single-file to the gates of the nuclear power plant in Vernon, an action they call “Powershift.”
Ian Walton gingerly handles a dust mask that dangles from his neck, as a friend warily asks if it is a prop.
“Maybe I'll need it as we get closer to the plant?” he says tentatively.
Meanwhile, other young people filter to the town green, carrying water bottles and backpacks for the 17-mile journey.
Other, older, people arrive as well, stalwarts of dozens of such events over the years, some carrying well-worn signs.
A college-aged assistant holds a colorful umbrella, shielding documentary filmmaker Robbie Leppzer from falling clumps of slush from the trees overhead as he pans the gathering crowd.
One man with long grey hair walks up to the crew, a grade-school girl in tow. “Don't take my picture, and don't take her picture,” he demands gruffly. “I'm not into that. I don't want to be famous.” (“That should be 'infamous,'” the child points out.)
The camera-shy man then tells an anecdote about being stopped in the 1970s. “The officer said that I have no record, but my FBI file is this thick,” he says, his thumb and index finger measuring a gap of a full inch or two of 1960s activism.
Though few people have appeared by the publicized departure time, the walk gets off to a bit of a slow start as the main coterie of Greenfield Community College students who are organizing the walk have decided to walk from the college itself.
And then the group arrives. Rose Whitcomb-Detmold and Ginevra Fitzgerald Bucklin-Lane hop into the snow on the common, surveying the crowd, which by this time numbers almost 40 people.
Whitcomb-Detmold, speaking through an uncooperative megaphone, speaks confidently of the anti-nuclear cause needing to be “taken up by a younger generation.”
Walton then reads what Bucklin-Lane would later describe as “beat poetry,” an earnest screed that honored the capacity of nature to purge itself of environmental contamination. (“The forest acts as Earth's liver,” he says hauntingly.)
In the audience, Nancy Braus of Putney, a longtime antinuclear activist, beams.
“Rose is just great,” she says with a grin. “These GCC kids - they're just great.”
And with that, Braus turns and, with the rest of the crowd, begins to walk to Vernon.
Wearing of the green?
In the days since U.S. District Judge J. Garvan Murtha's ruling in the Entergy v. Vermont case, Vermont Yankee's allies have certainly had reason to feel less dispirited. Two high-profile plant proponents are planning a Saint Patrick's Day rally - for “green power,” they say - to show support for the plant and its employees.
“The main reason for our rally is the usual: To show workers and the press that many people support the plant,” says Meredith Angwin, director of the Energy Education Project of the Ethan Allen Institute and a pro-Vermont Yankee blogger.
Angwin is co-organizing the rally with Howard Shaffer, coordinator of the Vermont Pilot Project of the American Nuclear Society.
“Plant opponents are always having rallies and vigils at the plant,” Shaffer wrote in a press release for the rally, which runs from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the gates of the plant on Saturday, March 17. “We want to show the people who work at the plant that many people support the plant and support their efforts.”
Since “Vermont surveys show opinion about the plant to be fairly evenly divided,” she says, it's time for the pro-nuclear side to make a visible statement of its own.
And that's not to imply that the effort is designed to buoy spirits. “Actually, my own impression is that the people at Vermont Yankee are energized by the court ruling,” says Angwin.
Despite January's federal ruling that invalidated legislative oversight of Vermont's regulation of the 40-year-old nuclear power substation - by any yardstick a huge victory for Entergy, the plant's owner - the Louisiana-based corporation filed a motion on Feb. 27 in U.S. District Court seeking to permanently enjoin the state from forcing Vermont Yankee to close, pending a decision by the Public Service Board and “any judicial review of that PSB decision” given the “looming” deadline of March 21.
Given Entergy's pending motion in U.S. District Court - which would require that the case, formally appealed by the state and now in the hands of the U.S. Circuit Court, be returned to its control - the company filed a motion to delay the Public Service Board, noting that Murtha's ruling would “compel issuance of the requested [Certificate of Public Good].”
On March 1, the board declined to honor Entergy's suggestion that the normal protocol be bent to accommodate the company, rebuffing the notion that Murtha's decision means a renewed CPG will be inevitable.
“Furthermore, even if the federal District Court grants Entergy VY's motions, we would still lose valuable time in our review of Entergy VY's CPG request,” the board responded. “The District Court expressly stated that its January 20 order does not 'purport to define or restrict the State's ability to decline to renew a certificate of public good on any ground not preempted or not violative of federal law.' Thus, the District Court explicitly acknowledged that the Board's CPG review may proceed, and Entergy VY has provided no basis for deferring this review.”
Donald M. Kreis, assistant professor of law at Vermont Law School and associate director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment there, writing on the VY issue on the law school's blog on the topic, calls Entergy's concerns “ridiculous.”
“It is perfectly obvious that shutting down the plant on March 21, under state law, would be inconsistent with Judge Murtha's decision,” writes Kreis. “And unless and until some higher court (i.e., the Court of Appeals and/or, perhaps eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court) tells Judge Murtha he was wrong, his decision is lawful and binding.”
Laying it on the line
Bob Bady walks through a plumbing supply store, mixing activism with his construction work as he discusses the “Occupy Entergy Headquarters” plans that are unfolding for Thursday, March 22.
After a rally at 11 a.m., at the Brattleboro Common, protestors will make the 3.5-mile walk up Putney Road to Entergy's corporate headquarters on Old Ferry Road, says Bady, one of the “core group members” of the Safe and Green Campaign, a local advocacy group. He also serves on the coordinating committee of the SAGE Alliance, a larger confederation of 30 to 40 groups that all want the plant to close.
“The intention is to deliver a message to the corporation with a rally on their land,” Bady says.
The message might result in arrests, though Bady says that police have indicated that they “don't want arrests, and they don't want a lot of arrests.” Participants risking arrest must be trained in nonviolence and be affiliated with an affinity group.
Bady says that planning for such acts of civil disobedience has been under way since early last summer. “Even before the ruling, we were talking and planning this sort of response,” he says.
“Our expectation is that Entergy will bring in legal machinations to keep operating, and that we will have reason to bring some other force into play here,” Bady says, calling Entergy's stewardship of Vermont Yankee “a really serious, dangerous scenario” that's “just not acceptable.”
Bady points to the parallels between Vermont Yankee and the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan, which featured the same containment design as the VY facility.
“It's the same reactor, the same age, the same lack of oversight, and the same corporate arrogance,” he says.
Bady also listed several other events that will take place in the buildup to March 21.
On Sunday, March 11 at 12:45 p.m., buses will drop people at the Vermont Yankee gates, and they will walk back to Brattleboro with their “evacuation gear” to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tidal wave that created catastrophic conditions at Fukushima. At a forum later, at 5 p.m., nuclear energy consultants Arnold and Maggie Gunderson will present what organizers describe as an “analysis and update on conditions” at Fukushima.
The forum will also feature Chiho Kaneko of Hartland, who will offer an eyewitness report about life in Fukushima after the nuclear catastrophe.
Noting that the state's appeal might well take four to five years to grind through the federal court system to the U.S. Supreme Court - a court whose current composition is not exactly unsympathetic to corporate interests - Bady says he finds it “personally irresponsible” to sit back and wait for the process to unfold on its own.
“That's why we're motivated to do this,” Bady says. “The movement is very much grassroots. It's determined by people participating.”
And he hopes those people will include some for whom the Occupy movement has struck a chord, some who will stay and work on the VY issue “instead of going to Boston or New York.”
“It's a huge environmental issue, a huge corporate subversion-of-democracy thing,” Bady says. “This is our own corporate saboteur in our own backyard.”
Parade's end
On this Saturday afternoon, Bady is one of about a dozen Vermont Yankee opponents waiting in the waning light in Vernon, at the gates of the nuclear power plant, for almost 50 Powershift walkers to arrive.
Slowly, protestors young and old - and a few in between - walk single file down Governor Hunt Road after the walk to Vermont by way of Huckle Hill in Bernardston, Mass.
Under the watchful gaze of a Vernon police officer stationed at the plant's gate, the crowd settled into a mode of nourishment and chatter, then dispersed to an after-party at the Stone Church in Brattleboro or to ad hoc transportation planning and ride sharing back to Greenfield.
Several days later, two of the primary movers of Powershift, Rose Whitcomb-Detmold and Ginevra Fitzgerald Bucklin-Lane, remain exhausted but energized by the undertaking.
The idea for this walk derives from the symbolism of evacuation, as do the other walks planned in Brattleboro in March. The students, whose college would serve as a “reception center” for residents of adjoining towns in case of nuclear catastrophe, see the idea of evacuation as “a joke,” Whitcomb-Detmold says.
For Bucklin-Lane, the symbolism of the journey is elegantly simple: “We're walking to this place that's only right there, and we're doing it together,” she says.
The idea for the walk took root in January, with seven students comprising an organizing committee that they took to calling the Fungi Affinity Group.
That was Bucklin-Lane's idea, she says with a mixture of pride and modesty.
“Mushrooms absorb a lot of toxic waste. They take toxins out of soils - it's pretty darn cool,” explains Bucklin-Lane, an environmental studies major who hopes to concentrate some future activism on the science of sustainable energy options - “a graceful descent from nuclear power.”
A resident of Montague, Whitcomb-Detmold, who studies international relations and social justice, says that she “feel[s] this issue on an emotional level.”
“I had really, really good high hopes going in,” she says. “I knew people were going to notice. But the most surprising thing was the enthusiasm, that even despite the crappy weather we had almost 50 people walking.”
Bucklin-Lane, who came to the area by way of Northampton, says that she learned of the Vermont Yankee conflict from one of her professors. She says that her growing awareness of the consequences and the risks of the nuclear power plant up the road put her “in emotional turmoil for a couple of weeks.”
Eventually, the group connected with the Safe and Green Campaign, and both students sing the praises of the anti-nuclear veterans who helped them organize the Powershift march, set up the logistics, provide advice, and offer other resources and support.
Bucklin-Lane, a former Americorps volunteer, says that the walk was by far the most complex organizational undertaking that she's attempted.
“I've come to realize that I really enjoy organizing events,” she says. “It's so much fun raising awareness, talking to new people, meeting new people. It's a steep learning curve. It's hard to stay focused on my studies.”
For Whitcomb-Detmold, who describes herself as “the daughter of a longtime anti-nuke activist who has really passed on those values to me,” the issue transcends social justice and environmental well-being.
“It's a really emotional thing,” she says, describing the experience of working with Braus, Bady, Leslie Sullivan-Sachs, and other Windham County activists.
“I've known some of these people since I was born,” she says. “It's not only about me, or about a good future for all of us. It's like finding part of my community again.”