VERNON — Peter Shumlin recently brazenly misused the people of Vernon, a town we both have the privilege to serve. It's not the first time and probably won't be the last, and it says a good deal about the man who wants to be governor.
For the past year, Senator Shumlin has been doing everything he can to chase out of town a great neighbor: the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
So I was appalled, but not really surprised, when Peter Shumlin stood before the TV news cameras on Oct. 12 and shed crocodile tears on behalf of my fellow Vernon residents, victims of what he called “the worst environmental disaster in the history of the state of Vermont.”
Unless his expert advice about tritium mediation was followed, the town of Vernon's water supply would be dangerously, irreversibly irradiated. People would get sick. They would be unable to sell their worthless homes. All would be lost, lost, lost!
And we, the people of Vernon, sat in front of our television sets and said to one another, “This man is either grossly uninformed, or he's using us. Or both.”
The truth is, Peter Shumlin has terribly, and perhaps deliberately, overblown the consequences of a single Oct. 8 tritium reading. Many Vernon residents either work at the plant or know people who do. To put it bluntly, we know about nuclear safety from the “inside” and know it well.
The reading found just over a thousand picocuries of tritium (a substance also in movie theater exit signs and elsewhere). This barely registers on hypersensitive monitoring equipment. In fact, it's about 5 percent of the allowed federal limit in drinking water. Furthermore, the tritium from the leak sealed this spring has been largely removed as part of the Yankee-initiated monitoring and remediation plan. Many hard workers from Vernon helped make this happen.
In fact, if Peter were to get his way and Vermont Yankee closes, the environment will be worse off because of higher toxic emissions of carbon dioxide and other substances, a result of Vermont's increased dependence on fossil fuels.
To my fellow Vermonters living outside of Vernon, I say: there is no “environmental disaster.” There is just one ambitious politician trying to fan fear and ride its wave into the governor's office. If a real disaster was looming, municipal employees and the Selectboard would be pounding on Yankee's door - and those of many government agencies.
Peter must know his irresponsible statement will cause real human suffering in and around Vernon, everything from scaring children to making homes harder to sell to discouraging local investment of any kind. He should be ashamed of himself. But perhaps that is asking too much of a politician who would callously throw out of work hundreds of people in his own senate district while he seeks a political promotion.
There was terrible irony in something Peter said last Monday: “I feel nothing but sadness for the hard working people of Vernon.” I, too, feel sad for my hard-working townspeople, who want only to work in clean, good-paying jobs processing a valuable necessity for our fellow Vermonters, but who may indeed lose all because of this man's alarmist, anti-job perspective.
Peter Shumlin, stop cynically exploiting Vernon in the guise of “helping.” You've already helped enough.