BRATTLEBORO — Just for a minute, let's look at the Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee plant the way its leadership likely does - through a lens where the revelations of 2010 seem overblown and really don't mean much at all.
After all, the plant still produces electricity. Committed and capable employees still feel strongly that their actions keep the place running safely.
Even the well-publicized leak of the radioactive isotope tritium - found naturally in the cosmos and used in everyday applications like signs - might be only a footnote in the context of practical safety and the risks of everyday life. At least one pro-nuclear blogger points out that there's more tritium in a daily handful of Brazil nuts than one would risk from a bath in the water from Entergy's test well.
In this context, it's easier to understand why Entergy officials might be baffled at the public response to what's been happening in Vernon.
In this context, it's easier to see why the plant's public relations efforts earnestly focus on distributing numbers of picocuries, updates on test well drilling, and countless defensive assertions that residents of our Windham County towns and the greater region have never been harmed by such tiny quantities of the substance in a testing well.
This issue, in the final analysis, isn't about the tritium.
This issue is about the brazen behavior of multiple company representatives presenting false or incomplete information to the state's Public Service Board, to the state's nuclear engineers, to the state's consultants, and ultimately, in official reports tainted with the false information, to the state's lawmakers.
This issue is about the fact that this is not the first time this company has behaved outrageously in its legal comportment in Pubic Service Board hearings.
This issue is about a corporate culture that let this happen, a transgression that no amount of carefully worded apologies to the governor or manicured, vague statements to the press can even begin to address.
This issue is, above all, about trust - trust that the company flagrantly violated in multiple contexts until it was caught red-handed.
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For the past few months in newspapers across the state, including this one, Vermonters have read dozens of letters in support of Vermont Yankee from many of the plant's employees, who have offered their loyalty and trust in the plant's safety and viability. Many of these letters have provided thoughtful insight. A few resentfully dismissed the plant's critics as not knowing what they are talking about.
It is true that most citizens who oppose the continued operation of this plant do not have the same science or engineering backgrounds as many of VY's employees.
But we trust our own eyes and ears, and for years we have seen and heard things at and from the plant that scare the hell out of us.
A transformer fire. A cooling tower collapse. Irregularities in evacuation communications. Intoxicated employees. And, yes, even the tritium leak, which is serious and can have a huge effect on decommissioning costs, as well as the disturbing news that trace amounts of cobalt-60 have turned up in the search for the tritium leak.
And now, we see this: a damning pattern of false information - not from just one senior executive but from multiple sources - that rippled through the PSB's docket and the legislature's efforts to secure an accurate reliability assessment of the plant. We have seen this false information propagated in costly studies and analyses that presumed the accuracy of this information.
As a company, Entergy has violated the trust of state government multiple times through various failures to provide appropriate information.
During the Public Service Board's evaluation of the uprate issue - whether the plant would be allowed to generate 20 percent more power than it was originally designed to produce - the company was fined more than $50,000 to compensate its nemesis, the New England Coalition. Entergy had failed to provide relevant material - material the company tried to use in a hearing to contradict NEC's expert witness.
In 2005, the PSB fined Entergy $85,000 for beginning site construction work on two temporary buildings before receiving its approval, a fine levied in part because of a “pattern in which the Company has not complied with its legal obligations.”
So for many who have followed the often Kafkaesque twists and turns of Entergy's stewardship of Vermont Yankee, the tritium leak combines with the “miscommunication,” as the company has put it, to produce an explosive reaction to the fundamental dishonesty and disrespect of citizens and of the legal process.
Its apologies ring hollow. So does its lawyer's assertion that Entergy “gets it.”
How on earth can we trust that that's true? And why would we?
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In this latest instance, Vermont residents trusted Entergy to tell the truth under oath, especially when given the opportunity to correct the record. So did the Public Service Board. So did the legislature. So did the Department of Public Service.
Entergy did more than provide false information. This company breached the state government's trust, the trust of every person who lives here, the trust of every employee who works here, like so much tritium from a corroding pipe.
As much as some fervent antinuclear activists might find the concept distasteful, we all approach VY with a base load of trust. We have to. The plant's employees, on a most fundamental level, are responsible for our personal safety day in and day out. These employees will bear the brunt of the consequences from their superiors' actions.
If the plant cannot recover from these revelations, Entergy's leadership - not antinuclear activists, not the government - will bear the responsibility for the plant shutting down in 2012.
In that case, Entergy will have breached the trust of the many citizens and employees who stood by the plant through thick and thin, defending its employees, defending its role in the economy, defending its donations to charity, defending the cost of its electricity.
And those executives will have only themselves to blame for betraying those who trusted them the most.
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Correction: In this space last issue, a slip of your editor's fingers accidentally gave Vermont Yankee 10 extra years of operation, at least in theory. If all approvals happen as the company hopes and intends, Entergy will operate the plant only until 2032. We regret the error.