BRATTLEBORO — For Richard Watts, who grew up in the 1970s in Putney not far from Vermont Yankee, the nuclear power plant just wasn't on the radar.
“For my parents, it was the Vietnam War,” says Watts, who only dimly remembers class presentations about the plant, or maybe a field trip to the visitors' center that used to be on site. “I really don't remember Vermont Yankee being much of an issue.”
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s, and the 52-year-old lives in Burlington, has become an assistant research professor at the University of Vermont's Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, and has seen Vermont Yankee in the news up north with increasing frequency.
The son of former Putney residents Simon Watts, a furniture maker, and Heidi Watts, a schoolteacher, he has made his life's work researching how people follow stories in the media - “how we make sense of the stories we tell and the stories we hear” and “how the stories move through media.”
And the story of Vermont Yankee, he says, was a “great one to follow and trace.”
As an extension of two academic, peer-reviewed papers studying the Vermont Yankee issue, Watts has written a book, “Public Meltdown: The Story of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant,” which turns a spotlight on the stewardship of the plant by Entergy, the company that purchased VY in 2002.
After years of following the VY story - both through analyzing media coverage and doing his own reporting - Watts tells his own narrative: how Vermont Yankee went from a nondescript story statewide (despite persistent local opposition) to losing the Senate vote that was supposed to decide its fate.
The story shifts
In storytelling terms, Watts describes the initial prevailing narrative of the plant as “an economic engine that provides good jobs.” “Public Meltdown” describes how that story turned upside down, beginning with the iconic photos of the 2007 cooling tower collapse, and evolving into the story of “an aging, deteriorating plant.”
“Their own missteps contributed,” Watts says of Entergy officials. “They weren't able to navigate Vermont's various policies and culture, and that includes relationships with the media.”
In addition, Watts says, Entergy was faced with the increasing attention of media-savvy activists who knew Montpelier and the political culture of Vermont.
“We had very skilled opposites who promoted [Entergy] as an untrustworthy, out-of-state company,” he says. “That wasn't by accident.”
Entergy, he says, had “tons of money” to influence its perception within the halls of the Statehouse.
“But over time, whether you agree with it or not, the activists' story became the prominent story,” Watts says.
In his book, he points to a scholarly analysis of a news media database of more than 1,400 stories about the plant from varied news sources: a local newspaper (The Reformer), the state's largest newspaper (The Burlington Free Press), a wire service (The Associated Press), a television station (WCAX), and a radio station (Vermont Public Radio).
He calls on analysis of this news coverage by counting the frequency of words and concepts, illustrating the text with graphs like the frequency of words that convey the concept of “trust” (or lack thereof), ranging from near-zero at Entergy's purchase of the plant.
That media coverage stayed constant until 2007, with the cooling-tower collapse whose imagery began to filter into the consciousness of Vermonters outside of the county.
The word frequency continued its escalation after Entergy's proposal to spin Vermont Yankee and several of its other aging nuclear power plant fleet into a new company, Enexus; through its negotiations with Vermont utilities; through its interaction with state legislators and state regulators at the Public Service Department; and finally, through the debacle of high-level company officials' sworn testimony that at best failed to clarify the difference between underground pipes and pipes that ran below the surface of the ground but were encased in concrete.
Watts says that the news coverage of these events had an amplifying effect on the competing narratives of his story. The predominant story of the plant shifted from the near-certain state approval of its Certificate of Public Good to a rebuke from the state Senate and even the loss of confidence of the plant's most high-profile state political supporter, then-Governor Jim Douglas.
“If the press had not conveyed this, it might have been a very different policy outcome,” Watts observes.