WESTMINSTER — An extraordinary notion has crept into the public dialogue about closing Vermont Yankee. The notion is that unless Vermont has a vast array of new in-state power sources in place on March 12, 2012 at midnight, the lights will go out along with the deadly, glowing fission at the heart of VY.
This notion has been on the lips of our gubernatorial candidates and other public officials. It is encouraged by Entergy propaganda. And it leads, of course, to another notion: that we cannot decide to close the plant unless and until we have replaced it with 600 windmills or a gazillion solar panels, or 70,000 more pooping cows.
Both ideas are false. While it is desirable to replace VY with in-state renewables for a number of reasons, doing so is in no way a necessary prerequisite to making the decision to close the plant in 2012.
You only have to reflect a moment on your own experience to realize why. During its lifetime, VY has gone off-line dozens of times due to mishaps (several of them in very recent memory), periodically for weeks at a time for refueling, and for many months such as during replacement of faulty reactor coolant pipes.
Even with a SCRAM, a completely unpredictable sudden shutdown of a nuclear reactor, when 33 percent of our power supply disappears in an eye blink, the lights in Vermont never flicker. There are no brownouts. There is no panicked scramble to string extension cords to Canada.
How come? Because Vermont is not an energy island.
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Vermont is part of the ISO-New England power grid, whose mission is to keep the lights on no matter what is happening to any individual power plant in the mix. The grid's total generation capacity is 32,000 megawatts (MW). At 620 MW, VY represents less than 2 percent of that capacity. At any one time, between 4,000 MW and 10,000 MW is not being used and stands ready to pick up load when major generators like VY go off line unexpectedly.
That's why you never know VY has gone down until you read the headlines the next day. And that's why there is absolutely no reason to link the issue of closing VY with the notion that we must build in-state generation to replace it.
Having said that, a non-nuclear transition to in-state renewables is entirely possible.
Such a transition should begin with the full exploitation of energy efficiency because it is cheaper and friendlier to the environment than any source of power. Even Governor Jim Douglas's Department of Public Service agrees that within a few short years at least 15 percent of Vermont's power demand could be saved this way.
That's more than a third of the power needed to replace the portion of VY power Vermonters use. It will save ratepayers millions of dollars and create hundreds of new in-state jobs. Today, Efficiency Vermont employs more than 150 people while saving 40 MW to 50 MW annually. That's three jobs created per megawatt saved, versus only one job at VY.
After the efficiency savings above, only 150 MW of power will be required to make up the VY deficit - less if Vermont utilities take less of the nuclear power anyway, as is currently planned.
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If the legislature rejects the VY license extension, Vermont can rely on short-term contracts from region-wide sources of hydro or wind or other renewables to carry us through a period during which we undertake the orderly development of in-state renewable sources to meet this demand.
That development need not take long if permitting issues can be settled. Windmills can be erected in a construction season. Biomass plants can be built in two years (and provide 4 to 5 jobs per megawatt). With appropriate encouragement, some capacity might even be ready to go on-line before VY closes.
A transition to safer, cleaner renewable energy sources is needed, but VY is not the bridge to get us there. Its spans are strung with cables of nuclear risk and hung on pillars of dry casks full of deadly wastes.
Attempting to cross it may lead us to a future nobody can live with.