Straight answers
Toolbox
Published: February 7, 2010
The Douglas administration has been forced to take a tough line on false statements coming from the owners of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and on the problems arising from the underground pipes now leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater in Vernon.
Entergy Nuclear, the owner of Yankee, responded to the furor last week by removing Jay Thayer from his post as vice president of operations for Vermont Yankee. Thayer is the Entergy executive who told the Legislature that Vermont Yankee did not have underground pipes. His statements were part of what Vermont regulators call a pattern of deceit practiced by Entergy about the plant.
But removing Thayer is not enough, said Vermont officials. Getting rid of one person is "tokenism," according to Public Service Commissioner David O'Brien. The company must do more to get its act together before Vermonters can trust what it says.
O'Brien may be covering up his own embarrassment about the way he ignored warnings about Entergy's pipe problem. He can't say he wasn't warned about Entergy's falsehoods. As Shay Totten of Seven Days has reported, Arnie Gunderson, a nuclear engineer who is a member of the Vermont Oversight Panel and a consultant to the Legislature on nuclear matters, told the Public Service Department last summer that Entergy was misstating the facts about the pipes.
Gunderson has always been viewed by the Douglas administration as an anti-nuclear gadfly, but on Entergy and Vermont Yankee the gadflies are the ones who have been right. Lately, O'Brien has gotten the message that Entergy's word cannot be trusted.
More questions arose last week when a transcript became public showing the substance of a conference held by Wayne Leonard, chairman and CEO of Entergy Corp., with nuclear industry analysts. During his presentation, he made several noteworthy statements.
He said that Vermont Yankee was projected to lose money over the next two years but that Entergy planned to raise prices over the next 20 years to get a positive cash flow. He said closing Vermont Yankee wouldn't make much difference to the company's bottom line. He said the company had sought to improve cash flow last year by "lower working capital requirements." In other words, the company is investing less in the plant to enhance profits, which may account for the fact that it is falling apart.
These statements raise a number of questions. If the company plans to raise prices over the next 20 years, what does that mean for Vermont ratepayers, should the plant's license be extended? If the plant is only marginally profitable, why would anyone invest in the spinoff company to which Entergy plans to consign Vermont Yankee? Why should Vermont ratepayers be saddled with the burden of paying off the debt taken on by Enexus, the new spinoff company Entergy hopes to create?
Beyond these questions, there are many unanswered issues about the potential impact of the tritium that is leaking into the ground and the costs of cleaning it up, which could push the price of decommissioning the plant far higher than anticipated.
The latest finding Friday showed a concentration of 2.7 million picocuries per liter of tritium, which far exceeds the previously reported level of 774,825. Both of these are tremendously beyond the federal limit of 20,000 for drinking water.
Entergy Nuclear raised eyebrows when it issued a press release saying the finding of a vastly higher concentration in the groundwater was "good news." William Irwin, radiological health chief for the Vermont Department of Health, rebuffed Entergy's statement. "This is not good news. None of this is really good news," he said.
Entergy's point was that if the monitoring wells are finding contamination in a higher concentration, that means investigators are getting closer to the source of the leak. If they are finding the source, that may be viewed as good news. That there is radioactive water seeping into the groundwater is bad news for Vermont and for Entergy.
It remains to be seen whether O'Brien and Gov. James Douglas are making a show of anger to cover for their previous complacency or whether they are ready to accept the skeptical view of Gunderson and others who have long harbored distrust of Entergy. Distrust now is warranted.
Entergy is now marshaling a corporate team to address what it must see as its Vermont problem. In fact, Vermont has an Entergy problem — a major employer and source of energy with corporate plans to flee responsibility for its problem-plagued plant by shifting ownership to a debt-burdened entity that may well prove incapable of dealing with leaking pipes and poisoned land.
Vermont legislators have been seeking straight answers from Entergy for months. The answers have only become more twisted. We are unsure that will change.
31