The Formal Negotiations: On Decommissioning Vermont Yankee

Attorney General Sorrell 

After some preliminary reports that "negotiations between Governor Shumlin's administration and Entergy would be held," we finally have a report that one such meeting was held.

"Issues" were discussed--

Dave Gram of Associated Press reports that Governor Shumlin, Attorney General Sorrell, Department of Public Service Commissioner Recchia (and perhaps others) are meeting with Entergy. The group plans to prepare a "global agreement" on decommissioning issues. They have met at least once, and  they plan to meet again in early December.  

This is a round of "formal negotiations." According to Sorrell, it includes discussion of the following "issues":

• how much work will need to be done on the site, 
• what's in the underground piping, 
• how long it's likely to take for the nuclear fuel rods to cool enough that they can be moved

Since these "issues" are actually not "issues" but facts, I think  the Shumlin people are actually just getting a briefing from Entergy. This doesn't sound like a "negotiation."  If it is any kind of negotiation,  I wish the plant the best of luck.  I think that Entergy may want a global agreement.

But sound bites may be planned.

I also think that Governor Shumlin will prefer having sound bites to having an agreement. 

Governor Shumlin

I suspect Shumlin plans to hold a press conference after the meetings. In this conference, he will claim that Entergy-Louisiana would not give Shumlin what he wants for the people-of-Vermont. (We don't live in Louisiana, you know?)

Okay, okay, I am judging Shumlin by his past words and his past actions.  He may have changed.  I believe that people can change.  I will have to wait and see if Governor Shumlin has changed.  For the sake of my friends at the plant, I hope Shumlin has changed!

However, if Shumlin begins insulting "Entergy-Louisiana" in the near future, please remember that you read it here first.

AP Retraction: No Iodine Pills, No Radiation Poisoning at Brattleboro High School

"Iodine Pills" at Brattleboro High School
On Saturday April 14, there was a rally against Vermont Yankee in downtown Brattleboro.  AP had a story about it which was widely reprinted. Among other places, the story appeared in the Burlington Free Press.  The article was titled Vermont Yankee protest draws quadruple-digit crowd.

The AP story included this astounding statement:
Putney resident Nancy Olsen, 65, a teacher, said she stumbled upon the rally and stopped to see what people had to say. Overall, she said, she has mixed feelings about the plant remaining open.


“When the school distributed iodine pills to the teachers it was a little bit of a shock, because I hadn’t really thought about it that much,” she said, referring to the pills that were handed out at Brattleboro Union High School during last year’s tritium leak to counteract the radiation poisoning. 


What-what-what-what?? ( That was my reaction.)  Pills were handed out at Brattleboro High School?  Only to the teachers?  KI for tritium? "The radiation poisoning?" And the tritium leak was 2010, not last year, though that seems a rather trivial point, considering everything else.

Calling the High School

After I read this, I called Brattleboro Union High School to find out more about it.  Olsen is a teacher at the high school, and they offered to connect me to her.  However, I figured I already knew what she had said, and did not ask to be connected.  I wanted to know if and when such pills were distributed: therefore, I wanted to speak to the principal.

I spoke to people, but I didn't do a very good investigation. I am not blaming anyone for not resolving the issue.  Everybody was very nice. Everybody also seemed very eager to refer me to someone else to talk to. Before I was done, I had spoken with someone in the prinicipal's office, someone in the school district office, and one of the school nurses. I was also encouraged to speak to the Vermont Department of Health, but I didn't follow up.  In general, the people I spoke to didn't know about any KI distribution, but nobody said: "It certainly did NOT happen."

I folded my mini-investigation. Before I folded, I spoke to some Brattleboro friends about my adventures. I have no idea if my friends followed up the investigation.

Retraction

Something happened.  I don't know who did what, but something happened that encouraged the AP to write a correction, which is now running in various papers. Here's the correction:

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) — In a story about the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, The Associated Press erroneously reported several details about a tritium leak from the plant. The tritium did not cause radiation poisoning and posed no harm to the public, according to state health officials. The leak took place over a couple of months in late 2009 and early 2010, not last year. Also, the Vermont Health Department distributes potassium iodide — not iodine— pills in case of a leak of a different type of radiation and did not distribute pills for the tritium leak.

It was good to see this correction.

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My own coverage of the rally is in two parts: Three Views of the April 14 Rally, and We start with Vermont Yankee.  Later, we shut down capitalism.

The Strontium Fish and the Associated Press

In August, the Vermont Department of Public Health analyzed some Connecticut River fish for radioactive strontium. To their surprise, they found strontium in the flesh of one fish (they usually find it in the bones). Amounts were background levels, and officials in the Department of Health said that they did not believe the strontium came from Vermont Yankee, there was no pathway from Vermont Yankee to the river for strontium, and the levels of strontium in the fish were very low. The fish would have been safe to eat. (For background on all this, I recommend Victoria Barq's posts at NEI Nuclear Notes and NRC Chairman Jaczko's letter to Representative Markey on the subject.)

Larry Smith, plant spokesman, said there was "absolutely no evidence that Vermont Yankee is the source for the strontium 90."

On the same day as the announcement, AP reporter Dave Gram wrote an article which said that Smith's statement did not mention the plant's announcement in May of 2010 that strontium-90 had been found not in groundwater, but in soil samples taken from the plant grounds.

Indeed, there had been some strontium found in soil near the tritium leak. All such soil was removed and appropriately disposed. No strontium was ever found in the groundwater, which means it did not migrate to the river. As I quoted in my August blog post, Irwin (of the Vermont Department of Health) says he doesn’t believe the Strontium-90 found in the fish was from Vermont Yankee. “We would need to see a pathway between the source and the fish,” he said.

You would think that would be the end of the story. It wasn't.

The Next AP Report

On August 6, Gram wrote another article about the fish. In this article, Gram reported that the Vermont Nuke Plant Had Past Radioactive Releases. Quoting his article: But in at least one of the quarters in each year from 2002 to 2005, Vermont Yankee told the NRC in its annual report on radioactive leaks that it had released some strontium-90, a radioactive substance linked to cancer and leukemia.

A question occurs. Did Gram look at the reports to the NRC, or did he just quote Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear about the reports without checking the reports? Basically, yearly releases of Sr 89 and 90, combined, were about two ten-thousandth of a curie. This information on quantity is in the NRC reports referenced above. I am preparing another blog post with links to NRC reports. (If you are impatient with my blogging, please go to the NRC website and search the Adams files for Vermont Yankee effluent reports.)

All put together, the reported releases are tiny. Strontium 90 releases from the plant are even smaller: I added strontium 89 and 90 to get ten-thousandths of a curie. Strontium 90 releases are on the order of ten to the minus 7 or 8 curies. This is in the level of ten to hundred billionths of a curie. In the biosphere, these releases cannot be distinguished from background strontium.

Why No Numbers?

Those numbers are not in the AP story, however.

So, question arises: why did the reporter write that there were releases and not quantify the releases? The numbers are in the same NRC reports that lead to the conclusion that "Vermont Yankee reported releases" to the NRC. Did the reporter not know the quantities (poor quality reporting)? Did he know, but decide not to admit the quantities were very low (biased reporting)? Obviously, I don't know the answer to these questions.

However, I do not want to just point a finger at a single reporter. This type of reporting looks like Business as Usual for AP about nuclear energy.

AP Reporting on Nuclear

The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded through Columbia University, and the Columbia School of Journalism is widely acknowledged as one of the premier schools of journalism in the country.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) is a prestigious watchdog for good journalism. In the past three months, CJR has criticized two AP series for disorganized and slanted reporting of nuclear matters. In the first review, September 28, CJR first blasted the Nuclear Energy Institute for a heavy-handed response to the AP articles.. Then CJR got around to looking at the AP articles themselves.

But the AP series, while it tackles a critically important public policy issue, suffers from lapses in organization, narrative exposition, and basic material selection, what to leave in and what to leave out.....As a citizen reader with no particular background in nuclear power generation but residing less than 50 miles (the preferred safety margin, according to the AP report) from one of these old clunkers, I felt throughout like I was clinging to a pendulum, swinging wildly between “Uh oh” and “Phew, false alarm.”

Two months later, AP had an article about the consequences of Fukushima. On November 22, CJR reviewed the AP work on Fukushima.

Journalists often play up the dramatic and alarming aspects of the information they’ve found, and play down or leave out the ameliorative, neutral, or balancing aspects that might help do justice to the truth, but which could “weaken” the story. The AP’s article illustrates what this looks like.

Conclusion: when the CJR gives several negative reviews to a source for biased or confusing reporting on a particular issue, something is happening at that source. I think something is happening at AP. When I read an AP story about nuclear, I expect to see biased reporting.

Update: Canadian Energy Issues blog linked to this post and expanded on some of the themes. The title of their blog post is Why so much anti-nuclear sentiment at a time when the world urgently needs a major expansion of nuclear energy? It is being deliberately manufactured, by leading mainstream media vehicles like the Associated Press Thank you to Steve Aplin of Canadian Energy Issues.

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Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, from Wikipedia.

In full disclosure: our son-in-law is a professor at Columbia, and several members of the family (including our daughter) hold degrees from that institution.