BRATTLEBORO — Open letter to James Volz, David Coen, and John Burke of the Vermont Public Service Board:
Gentlemen, let me suggest a different perspective on the leaks and lies of Entergy Vermont Yankee.
Please imagine that Entergy is coming to Vermont for the first time to ask the Vermont Public Service Board for a Certificate of Public Good (CPG) to set up shop in Vernon.
Here's what they propose:
• Using a 1960s-designed nuclear reactor running at 120 percent of its original design capacity to boil water from the Connecticut River to produce energy equivalent to 2 percent of the power available from the New England grid.
• Purchasing nuclear fuel rods made from uranium enriched off-site with a process that produces depleted uranium (DU). DU is chemically toxic and radioactive. It damages cells and DNA, leading to cancers and birth defects. Its half-life is 4.5 billion years.
• Burying pipes to carry radioactive isotopes such as tritium, cesium, cobalt, and strontium throughout the facility while making assurances that these isotopes could never leak into groundwater (legally a public domain) or into the Connecticut River, or otherwise pose any threat whatsoever to public health or safety.
• Burying electrical cables with the assumption that they will never be submerged in groundwater or subjected to earthquakes, thereby causing a disruption of safety systems.
• Producing highly toxic radioactive waste that will be deadly for a million years and for which there is no known safe means of disposal. Plutonium in this material is used to make nuclear bombs.
• Storing highly radioactive “spent” fuel assemblies in a pool of water 70 feet in the air under a sheet-metal roof (not impregnable to crashing airliners) or in dry casks made of steel and concrete sited at ground level in the open air behind a wooden fence to protect them from unauthorized persons with malicious intent.
If we were working with a clean slate, in other words, the Vermont Public Service Board would surely turn down such an outrageous proposal, especially knowing that safe, clean, green energy technology exists to make up for the 2 percent of the power from the New England grid that wouldn't be coming from Entergy's proposed plant.
I ask the Public Service Board to revoke Vermont Yankee's CPG for its general operations as well as the CPG for its power uprate, and I also ask the board to require ENVY to shut down its reactor until any and all leaks of radioactive materials are identified and cleaned up and there is a guarantee that such leaks can never occur again.
Also, any buried electrical cables need to be dug up and placed above ground where they can't be submerged in water. In addition, fines should be imposed for the titium, cesium, cobalt, strontium leaks.
We can't risk a catastrophic accident while waiting until March 21, 2012, when VY's 40-year operating license expires. Please do the right thing for the people of Vermont, as well as the down-winders in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.