VERNON — Altogether, my colleagues and I spent about two weeks in communities with nuclear power plants asking questions, getting opinions and weighing the facts as part of our multimedia journalism project, News21's Powering a Nation.
I still didn't know how I felt about nuclear power. The good things seemed really good, and the bad things seemed really bad.
In order to gain a better perspective on the nuclear issue, we decided that we needed to see the inner workings of a plant for ourselves.
We were very lucky to be offered an opportunity to tour Entergy Nuclear's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. Director of Communications Larry Smith, the plant's official tour guide, agreed to show us around.
Not only were we allowed to tour the plant, we were also permitted to bring cameras, but there were things that we could not photograph. Namely, we had to avoid taking pictures of any of the security measures, including the perimeter fences, cameras, and screening equipment.
Since security is such an important part of a plant, the first step before entering was the security screening, similar to what you might experience at an airport. The security guard went through my camera bag thoroughly.
Then we received our visitor badges, scanned our palms, and entered the plant through a tall, subway-style turnstile.
The first building serves as a staging area where a plant worker (the only one we saw until we later exited the reactor building) was in charge of reading us our visitor responsibilities and setting up our radiation monitors.
We wore two monitors. One provided a live reading of our exposure during our time in the plant; the other recorded a more precise measurement to be mailed to us later. Add a hard hat, safety glasses and earplugs, and we were ready to get nuclear.
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The first thing that struck me as we entered the reactor building was the noise: a constant, brain-scrambling hum. At times, it got so loud we could only communicate with Larry through hand gestures. The turbine room was by far the loudest place in the entire plant.
The heat was difficult to adjust to as well. It was 100 degrees or hotter throughout the entire reactor building. There were spots labeled “Do Not Linger” in the hottest places because the heat was a result of radioactive steam.
For the most part, the plant is a concrete building with all kinds of pipes and valves, slate-gray containers, and warning signs. There are few people. From what Larry told us, the plant bustles with workers more during their scheduled outage periods, which occur every 18 months and last about 30 days.
During that time, the reactor shuts down and contractors come to the plant to perform maintenance and swap out fuel bundles. VY recently completed its outage month, so the plant was mostly deserted during our visit.
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The highlight of the tour was seeing the spent fuel pool. It is where the majority of the spent fuel from a plant's entire operational history is kept. Vermont Yankee's houses about 38 years' worth.
Spent fuel is still extremely radioactive, but anti-proliferation laws prevent plants from reprocessing it and using more of their radioactive energy. The bundles are kept in pools about 40 feet deep (about the height of a four-story building) and enclosed in several feet of concrete. The water keeps the radiation contained and the fuel cool.
We expected something like a glowing pool of radiation, full of green glowing rods like in The Simpsons.
But the pool is deep and serene. It moves gently. What at first seemed like a reflecting pool eventually revealed hundreds of canisters of spent fuel rods.
It was a bizarre feeling standing over so much radioactive material: a little nerve-wracking, a little daring.
Larry was the most nervous, though. He kept reminding me that people aren't usually allowed to get that close to the pool for that long, let alone with a camera. Add “special” to that bizarre feeling.
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The pool was the last stop on the tour of the interior of the plant. We weaved our way back through the tunnels and stairways and reinforced doors back to the staging area, which also serves as the the radiation screening area.
On our way out, our possessions had to go through a radiation detector, and then placed on the “clean side.”
The “clean side” was literally on the other side of the small turnstile through which we had entered the reactor building. It seemed unofficial.
Then it was our turn. We had to stand in two different machines that scanned our entire bodies for radiation. They require that you stand really still while a female, British voice counts down from 10 or 15. Despite some small exposure, we were deemed acceptably clean.
Before we explored the exterior of the plant, News21 fellow Anna Carrington would make a little mistake that would later have us hustled out of the plant.
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The first stop outside was the above-ground, dry-cask storage.
Vermont Yankee anticipated being able to send some of their radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain before plans for that national nuclear waste repository were canceled.
These five giant, concrete-and-steel casks were assembled because the spent fuel pool is reaching capacity. Many plants in the U.S. will need to resort to dry-cask storage soon, as many are reaching capacity in their spent-fuel pools as well.
The storage and transport of radioactive nuclear waste is a major, hot-button issue in the nuclear debate. I will admit that there is something unsettling about having nuclear waste, which will continue to be radioactive for over 100,000 years, sitting out in a cask (which has a registered use of only 100 years) with nowhere to go.
Next, we visited the low-level radioactive waste that is kept in large, steel shipping containers. This includes things like papers, office supplies, radiation suits, and other items that might have been exposed to radiation at some point.
This is also radioactive matter that is sitting out, waiting to ship, with nowhere to go. Like many plants in the U.S., Vermont Yankee used to send this low-level waste to a waste-storage facility in Barnwell, S.C. However, this facility recently stopped accepting waste from the plants in 14 states.
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Our last stop was the location where the plant takes in water from the Connecticut River.
Most nuclear power plants are positioned on a major river because of the huge amount of water required to cool the process. Larry told us that this reactor uses 365,000 gallons of water a minute.
As I was setting up my last shot of the river's rushing water, we were approached by a security guard with a machine gun slung around his back.
“Larry, you're getting paged,” he said sternly. I knew we were about to get rushed out: “Lauren, Lauren, we need to go. Now.”
The armed guard escorted us out as Larry speculated nervously about our quick exit. He told us how we had been watched from the very moment we entered the plant. His theory was that I had taken pictures of something I shouldn't have and my content would be screened and deleted if questionable. I was worried.
Fortunately, our mistake was far more innocent. When we were turning in our radiation monitors, Anna also discarded her visitor badge. Without a badge, Anna was breaching the plant's security protocol, which requires all visitors to carry proper identification. We hustled back to the welcome center.
On the way, I convinced Larry to let me linger around the cooling towers to shoot video, while he talked nervously with his supervisor on the phone.
The towers are induced-draft cooling towers, not the traditional hyperboloid towers so often associated with nuclear power. The plant, which is across the street from an elementary school and a residential neighborhood, chose to use less visible models.
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Exhausted, sweaty and with 0.7 millirem of radiation exposure, our tour of Vermont Yankee came to a close.
As a journalist, it was an amazing experience and something that not many people get to see or photograph.
As a person, I feel slightly uneasy about the whole idea of it.
Even having witnessed the interior of a plant, I'm still on the fence as far as my opinion about nuclear power.