BRATTLEBORO — Everybody missed it.
All those stories about how Strontium-90 turned up in four test wells of the Vermont Yankee site. A 29-year half-life means that in about 300 years that property might be OK for a playground. I've no idea how many of us reading these words will be around in 100 years to see...who cares about that now, anyways?
I was sitting home with my next letter to the editor written and ready, but I remembered that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) comes to Brattleboro's Quality Inn on Feb. 19 to discuss Entergy's hastily submitted (two years in advance) Post Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR).
I could think of no draw - nothing to bring folks out - to the meeting. Until the leaking Strontium-90.
“Face it, Gary, everyone is done with this reactor issue, particularly now that it is shut,” I hear some say.
Bruce Watson spoke on behalf of the NRC on a webinar about VY's decommissioning on Feb. 5. He said that it is “up to the owners and the stakeholders of a reactor whether the reactor goes into immediate decontamination or SAFSTOR [a longer dismantlement of the reactor].”
We who show up at the meeting are stakeholders.
Up until now, Entergy has been planning to use SAFSTOR when the decommissioning trust fund has “enough” money to cover the costs of decontamination.
Entergy has another expense to add to its list: Strontium-90 remediation.
SAFSTOR is no longer appropriate. Now that that site is already contaminated with Strontium-90, Entergy should do the right thing: change the plan to immediate decontamination, and pony up.
The NRC should deny this current PSDAR as not specific enough and not exact enough. Clearly, Entergy has not elaborated on its plans to remediate that Strontium-90, as Entergy allegedly didn't know it was there.
Here's what I saw most journalists missed: The public trust groundwater does not belong to Entergy. It belongs to you and me.
For Entergy to be releasing unknown quantities of a horribly toxic substance into our groundwater for who knows how long, unmonitored, at unknown concentrations is just so wrong.
Either Entergy will be allowed to waltz willy-nilly to SAFSTOR while the solution to pollution is the radioactive dilution into the Connecticut River, or the NRC and the company will step up to protect the river and honor its word to be a good neighbor in its dealings with Vermont now, after the earlier years' rough start.
If speaking up for our river and working to get Entergy out of Vermont sooner rather than later is not enough of a pull to bring folks out to a meeting, I'm not sure what would be.