BRATTLEBORO — On the letter “The company I work for” [The Commons, Sept. 29]: err, arrgghh! Was it really written by a person or by a PR team?
Electricity that you and your company make is not emissions free. I believe the Vermont Attorney General ruled that your company stop declaring such nonsense.
Issues I have with your letter, Manu Sivaraman, include your reference to “low-cost electricity.” Your company has not yet offered the state a power deal for after March 21, 2012. The only reason the state has had affordable power until 2012 is due to the pay-to-play deal Entergy and the Department of Public Service made at the Public Service Board level on June 13, 2002. Whatever deal Entergy offered back in the end of 2009 was not cheap, or not as cheap as the power secured in the Hydro-Quèbec contingency plan deal.
Entergy lawyers have stated under oath to the Public Service Board that the workers at VY range from 450 to 650 workers, not including the contract workers.
The $400,000 in donations you refer to from you and Entergy pales in comparison to the contributions the old state-owned Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. used to make.
You attempted to spin yourselves as problem solvers, not as the problem. Radioisotopes in the public groundwater beneath the reactor are a problem. Pipes corroding from the inside out are a problem. Slow reaction to repair radiation from leaking pipes is a problem.
The NRC has agreed that it makes no distinction between the buried and underground pipes. This reminds me that Entergy trying to differentiate between buried and underground to the Public Service Board is an example of Entergy as problem, not a problem solver.
Who really cares how many days Entergy operated if the result is leaking radiation into the public soil? Who really cares if Entergy is a good corporate citizen if they have trouble telling truth to Vermont electricity regulators and to the public?
No amount of letters by employees can change that.
Entergy is trying to win its media blitz by repetition of points that are not truthfully based.
Yet Entergy accuses the unpaid anti-nuclear activists of spreading untruths.
It was up to Entergy to offer a power contract to the state. It was up to Entergy to do that years ago, and they have yet to do so. The state Senate voted not to send the issue to the Public Service Board. Now Entergy is in scramble mode to change the state, and the state's attitude toward the old reactor in Vernon.
My hope is that no amount of repetition of spurious pseudo-facts can do that.