Vermont Yankee Shut Down Today. Guest Post from VTEP

Vermont Yankee went off the grid at 12:12 p.m. today and was completely shut down at 1:04 p.m.

Brad Ferland of  VTEP issued the statement below, and I am pleased to publish it here.


Vermont Energy Partnership salutes Vermont Yankee on final day of operation

Today marks the final day of electricity production for Vermont Yankee. Since its first day of operations in 1972, Vermont Yankee has generated low-cost and low-carbon electricity totaling about three-quarters of the electricity produced in Vermont. For 42 years, it has provided approximately 650 high-paying jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of local and state tax revenue. The generous employees of Vermont Yankee have donated millions of dollars’ worth of time and treasure to area schools and social services.  Today, the final day of power operations, the Vermont Energy Partnership salutes Vermont Yankee for its many economic, environmental, and societal contributions to Vermont’s quality of life. We wish Vermont Yankee management and workers a smooth decommissioning.


 Brad Ferland, President


The Vermont Energy Partnership (www.vtep.org) is a diverse group of more than 90 business, labor, and community leaders committed to finding clean, affordable and reliable electricity solutions. Its mission is to educate policy makers, the media, businesses, and the general public about why electricity is imperative for prosperity, and about the optimal solutions to preserve and expand our electricity network. Entergy, owner of Vermont Yankee, is a member of the Vermont Energy Partnership.

Natural Gas
The future of the grid

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Some other links:

The Entergy press release on the closing, as it appears in the Brattleboro Reformer.  The press release gives a concise history of the plant.

Entergy's VYDecommissioning page has a video thanking Vermont and many links to articles.

Nuclear Matters, a pro-industry group, also has a press release about the plant closing. This release could be described as "there goes grid diversity."

Rod Adams wrote a blog post about Vermont Yankee: the post expresses a lot of what we are all feeling. You may enjoy reading it. Should groups that celebrate loss of 600 MWe of reliable, ultra-low emission nuclear be called “environmental?”

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I find it personally too difficult to write about this today.  Soon, I hope I will write something. Soon.

I decided to go with a natural gas image instead of a Vermont Yankee image for this article.  We're all supposed to look forward, aren't we?