BRATTLEBORO — Seven years ago, Robbie Leppzer found himself beginning to film a story that had started three decades before and still had no ending.
But in making “Power Struggle,” the documentary filmmaker has managed to distill the bitter last years of Vermont Yankee - more than 700 hours of raw footage - into a 104-minute story that he describes as a “chronicle of a political drama.”
The film will hit the big screen at a benefit screening on Thursday, Nov. 3, part of a larger effort to raise the funds for its completion.
Leppzer - who directed, produced, wrote, and edited the film - began the project in 2009, when Vermont Yankee and its corporate owner, Entergy, were preparing to apply to both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and to the Vermont Public Service Board for a 20-year extension.
The story of the plant took immediate twists and turns later that year as tritium, a radioactive isotope, was detected in groundwater at the plant, and its source was traced to underground pipes that Entergy officials claimed didn't actually exist.
A familiar figure
Leppzer, who tells the story from the perspective of the antinuclear activist movement, became a familiar figure in the background of the numerous rallies, public hearings, court proceedings, press conferences, community forums, and other events that revolved around the 2012 expiration of the plant's original operating license.
His cameras were rolling at the Statehouse in 2010, capturing the 26-4 Senate vote that effectively blocked the state Public Service Board from issuing the state's operating license. That vote, in turn, precipitated a chain reaction of litigation between the state and Entergy that culminated in the surprise announcement that the plant would begin the decommissioning process following the plant's shutdown in 2014.
Leppzer said the overall conflict necessarily involves the individual points of view of a number of the “key characters” in the Vermont Yankee story. These people cumulatively tell the story of the years leading up to the plant closing, aided by captions to distill the complicated sequence of events.
In the film, Leppzer turns his camera on a number of activists, including nonagenarian Frances Crowe of Northampton, Massachusetts, as she and other senior activists meticulously plan to chain closed to the plant's gates, and he follows Betsy Williams, of Westminster West, as she participates in a 2010 walk from Vernon to Montpelier and goes head to head with representatives of the NRC at a meeting in Brattleboro. Peter Shumlin, first as Senate president pro-tem and then as governor, plays a prominent role as he makes the closing of the plant a signature issue of his platform.
Balancing perspectives
The film does offer significant perspective from several prominent pro-Vermont Yankee and pro-nuclear voices, including Republican State Rep. Mike Hebert, now-retired plant spokesman Larry Smith, and nuclear blogger Meredith Angwin. It shows the solidarity of plant employees and supporters from the region.
The film frames Vermont Yankee as a case study of nuclear power in the U.S.; and Leppzer, who describes his work as “national in scope,” follows Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear engineer turned whistleblower, as multiple news outlets scramble to get his analysis of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan in 2011.
Within days of the NRC's approval of a federal license, the earthquake in Japan and subsequent tsunami created a catastrophe in Fukushima, whose reactors used the same containment design as VY.
In the end, Leppzer said, the final edited version of the film “reflects quite accurately the people who were out there day after day, month after month, year after year” - the antinuclear grassroots groups composed of “citizens taking to heart public affairs and matters that affect them personally.”
Long interest in documenting nuclear activism
In 1977, at age 18, Leppzer created his first documentary at the site of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, interviewing participants of a “mass civil disobedience” that resulted in the arrest of 1,414 of more than 2,000 protestors - an act that he said “gave birth to the national antinuclear movement.”
Leppzer created a two-hour documentary, “Voices of Three Mile Island,” in 1979 for public radio stations a few months after the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania. His work featured audio interviews with farmers and residents within a five-mile radius of the site.
He said he was taken with the “unique position” of Vermont, a state whose legislature gave itself the authority to regulate the plant at the state level in the 1960s. In 2006, the state enacted into law Act 160, which required that the state Public Service Board receive positive votes from both the House of Representatives and the Senate before it could issue a renewal of the plant's Certificate of Public Good - a law that was subsequently struck down in federal court.
Leppzer, whose business, Turning Tide Productions, is based in Wendell, Massachusetts, said he was taken by the accessibility of Vermont lawmakers.
“In a big picture sense, this is democracy in action - whether people's voices are heard against the big-money interests,” he said, calling the experience of being in the Vermont Statehouse “just an eye-opening experience” and praising the “openness and respect” of the part-time legislators.
Leppzer acknowledged the challenges of telling a complex story, noting that “one criticism is that it doesn't do justice to 40 years of activism.”
“It's a legitimate critique,” he said. “And frankly, I didn't have the footage.”
A labor of love
Leppzer said his seven-year project has cost $350,000 from a number of sources, from small private donations to the underwriting of HBO and NHK, the largest television network in Japan, which broadcast a 50-minute version of the documentary.
“This is a very low budget,” he said, noting that many of the dozens of people listed in the end credits were volunteers. The original score was composed and performed by John Sheldon, a musician in Amherst, Massachusetts.
The film that will show this week isn't fully complete. For Leppzer to create technical masters of “Power Struggle” - final versions suitable for broadcast and fully cleared for intellectual property issues like music licensing - he needs to raise $100,000. That figure would also enable him to create a robust website with additional material and footage.
He also is seeking an additional $100,000 for what he terms “a grassroots film tour of communities all over the country,” to show the film and engage in discussions - particularly in small communities and at college campuses - about the viability and safety of nuclear power and the nuclear waste stored at plants all over the nation.
“Half of the work of a film is to get it out there,” Leppzer said. “The other half is to get it in front of an audience.”
The benefit screening is intended both to raise money toward those ends and to stimulate public dialogue about what comes next in the decommissioning process. Governor Peter Shumlin will speak, and, following the screening, Leppzer will participate in a panel discussion with Arnie Gundersen and his wife and business partner Maggie Gundersen (founder of Fairewinds Energy Education), Betsy Williams (Safe and Green Campaign), Clay Turnbull (New England Coalition), Kate O'Connor (chair of the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel), and other film participants and stakeholders.
Leppzer brightened when asked how he felt seeing the film on the big screen for the first time at a recent showing in Northampton, calling it “the real payoff of an enjoyable process.”
“To see people and to see people's reactions - I love that part,” he said. “There's no experience like it.”
He hopes the experience will resonate with the community, particularly those engaged in antinuclear activism who will relive their story.
“How many times in your state or community do you see people you actually know on the big screen?” Leppzer noted. “It's very rare.”