The year 2010 echoed the worst of times for New England's Great River, the Connecticut.
Last Jan. 7, radioactive tritium was found leaking at Entergy's aging Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, right to the river's edge.
The plume continues. As of Dec.15, still-rising tritium levels at wells next to the river registered 495,000 picocuries per liter--25-times the EPA safe drinking water standard. Yet on Nov. 18, Entergy halted their groundwater extraction that slowed the radionuclide flow to the river.
May 3, 2010, witnessed the massive failure of Northfield Mountain's Pumped Storage. There should have been routine maintenance, but it was learned that the sediments from their huge reservoir had not been removed since 1990.
In this disaster, giant turbines and the mile-long tunnel to the river were cemented shut by slumped, hardening sediment. Owner FirstLight/GDF Suez began quietly shoveling the stuff into the river. Daily, for three months, the equivalent of up to 50 dump-truck loads of sediment poured into the river - as much as 45,000 cubic square yards.
EPA counsel Michael Wagner says that on June 23, a boater's tip noting “a very visible plume of turbid water coming from the area of the Northfield Mountain facility” arrived at its Office of Ecosystem Protection.
EPA's initial inspection wasn't until July 15, with a “cease and desist” order not coming until Aug. 4 for Clean Water Act violations “in the navigable waters of the United States.” Only one-third of the pollution was retrieved; 30,000 cubic square yards were simply flushed away - an oxygen- and-light-robbing assault on the fish, amphibians, and myriad invertebrates that are the life of a river.
FirstLight was not fined.
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In 2009, Entergy had stated that the pipes at Vermont Yankee that later leaked tritium “did not exist.” In October, a FirstLight employee told me that the EPA was apprised of their silt dumping from the beginning. Wagner said it was technically true. FirstLight notified EPA about breaking the plant on May 3, stating silt was entering the river.
“I don't believe they noted the volume,” Wagner says. “If the company had come and said, 'We are going to dump 65,000 cubic yards,' we would have told them “No.”
For seven months, silt-choked Northfield produced no electricity; Yankee was off-line at times last year, too. Yet, no energy shortage. How critical are these plants as they abuse the letter and spirit of federal licenses and environmental law in profiting from the public's river?
In the 1950s, the Connecticut was dubbed “the most beautifully landscaped sewer in America.” Industry used it as a latrine; officials ignored it.
The 1950s seem to be creeping back.
A further example: a decade back, the already-dismal annual fish passage success for hundreds of thousands of American shad reaching Turners Falls began to hover around 1 percent - as close to a 1950s “dead run” as you get.
That began in 1999, when electricity deregulation came to the sevem miles of river comprising the Northfield Mountain/Turners Falls Dam hydro-complex, and Northfield ramped-up its up-and-down manipulation of flows and river levels to profit from short-term energy price spikes.
The rapid fluctuations are experienced acutely at Turners Falls, as the shad attempt to pass upstream.
Last May, Northfield inadvertently created its own science experiment by shutting down for 29 weeks. This happened without foresight or pointed experimentation from the $12 million federal Conte Fish Lab in Turners Falls, or the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC), the 40-year-old state/federal fisheries partnership charged with protecting migratory shad.
Some 16,768 shad - the most since 1995 - passed Turners Falls dam. That's an 800-1,000 percent increase over the decade's annual averages.
Sadly, only 290 shad were counted upstream beyond Northfield's stream of silt at the Vernon dam. None reached Bellows Falls. It's now been nine years since Vernon passed a thousand shad.
Those counts, made by Greenfield Community College with FirstLight funding, are suspect and likely low.
Counting equipment crashed on 17 different days at the dam's “spillway ladder”- the one shad negotiate most effectively. It's accessed only when rare, ample flows are released at the dam to the river's natural bed. Shad will then by-pass a treacherous ladder two miles south at the canal, and swim directly upriver to the dam.
Shad surged there following a May 27 deluge. Sadly, seven more days of data was lost when “gatehouse” counting equipment failed. Turners “daily” fish counts were AWOL for nearly a month. Yet, even with broken data, the impacts of Northfield-Turners flows - long-ignored in lieu of Conte and CRASC's failed $500 million salmon restoration project (just 51 salmon in 2010) - come into stark relief.
It's 2011, not 1950. Yet the year's best river science arose from a giant mistake - and some of its best protection resulted from a citizen picking up a phone.
It's time for an all-new fisheries commission, and for the Northfield-Turners hydro owners to build the fish lift that the public's been owed there for more than a decade.
As for Vermont Yankee, its record speaks for itself. It's time to shut down.