Nuclear Blogger Carnival #304, at Yes Vermont Yankee

Once again, we are proud to host the Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers, right here at Yes Vermont Yankee. The Carnival is a compendium of nuclear blogs that rotates from blog site to blog site, and it is always a pleasure and an honor to host it.

Let's start by looking into the future with nuclear energy.

Expanding the Definition of Renewable

At Nuke Power Talk, Gail Marcus discusses how words like “renewable” come to be associated with specific technologies, but looking at the bigger picture.  For example, solar and wind, usually regarded as renewable, use non-renewable materials to extract the “renewable” energy.  On the other hand, we may well be able to extract uranium from seawater in the future. This could could make nuclear energy as renewable as solar and wind power.

Progress Report on HTGR reactors in China and U.S.

At Neutron Bytes, Dan Yurman describes newly-achieved milestones in the development of the  high temperature gas cooled reactor (HTGR).  The HTGR concept has more than three decades of history behind it.  Both the U.S. and China are developing this type of reactor, and it has had several new breakout milestones in both countries.

Is Duke Still Banking on Lee?

At Neutron Bytes, Dan Yurman looks at the prospects for the new Lee plant.  Duke will complete the NRC licensing process, but the answer to the question whether or when it will build the nuclear power station comes in several parts spread over two states.

Sometime later this year the NRC will issue a combined operating license (COL) to the William States Lee III nuclear power plant which references twin Westinghouse 1150 MW AP1000 nuclear reactors. Duke CEO Lynn Good says that once the utility gets the license from the NRC, it will still have to decide “how and whether it makes sense to build nuclear.” Even if Duke started this year, it could take six-to-ten years before either unit entered revenue service.

“There are all kinds of considerations,” Good says. The utility, as a publicly traded firm, has to take into account a “prudent investor.” With a market capitalization of $55 billion, the estimated $12 billion the two units could cost would be just over 20% of the total value of the giant utility. That’s pretty close to a “bet the company” decision which makes prudence a key factor in assessing the need for the project.

Now, let's look at why we need nuclear energy!

Illinois’ Nuclear Dilemma Embroils Famed Climate Scientist James Hansen

At Forbes, James Conca writes that Illinois faces a peculiar dilemma in planning its clean energy future. Unless something is done, the state is going to lose its most important low-carbon energy source: nuclear energy. On Monday, a coalition of scientists and conservationists, including famed climate scientist James Hansen, sent an open letter to Illinois legislators. The scientists asked the legislators to stop nuclear closures from happening. (This post has an excellent graphic, which shows that nuclear might require a 0.3 cent per kWh surcharge to keep the plants running, while solar subsidies in Illinois are 21.9 cents per kWh.)

The Worth-It Threshold – When gas or gas + renewables is as bad for climate as a coal plant

At Atomic Insights a guest post by Mike Conley & Tim Maloney basically asks whether burning natural gas is truly better than coal for the climate.  Burning methane for energy produces about half the CO2 of coal, which is a good thing. But fugitive methane – the gas that leaks before it can be burned – is a powerful greenhouse gas, with 84X the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2.

The big idea behind wind and solar farms is to fight global warming by reducing greenhouse gases. But since most of a farm’s power is actually generated by gas, the rationale for a massive build-out of utility-scale wind and solar hinges on the issue of fugitive methane.

That rationale just had a major meltdown at Porter Ranch.

Fallout From The Nuclear Security Summit

At Forbes, James Conca reports on the Nuclear Security Summit last week in Washington, D.C. The Summit showcased significant progress in reducing global nuclear weapons and nuclear material stockpiles, and increased security on nuclear facilities. A dozen countries are now free of weapons-grade materials.

There is a lot of good news: a newly-amended nuclear protection treaty was signed by over 100 countries. The historic nuclear deal with Iran has, so far, gone as planned. However, China is the country that is expanding most in nuclear power and weapons.

Looking backward a bit, and learning from history

Chernobyl through the mist of decades

At ANS Nuclear Cafe, Will Davis looks at Chernobyl: what happened, and what people said happened.  The fog of three decades has obscured the memory of the Chernobyl accident. Many incorrect sources were written after the accident, and have have misled those in search of the facts.  Will Davis uses historic documents and accounts of those directly involved during and after the accident.  With the keen eye of a historian, Davis clarifies our perception of what really happened before, during and after.

State Control of Decommissioning Funds is a Bad Idea

At Yes Vermont Yankee, guest blogger Richard January describes the state of Vermont's attempts to "have input" on the decommissioning process.  Vermont and Massachusetts are lobbying the NRC for "tighter rule-making" on decommissioning. As January points out, the state of Vermont is strapped for cash, and it is not clear that state decisions would be driven solely by safety, and not by the desire for another infusion of Vermont Yankee cash.  NRC oversight of decommissioning is a far better idea.


Once again, pro-nuclear bloggers have covered many aspects of energy: nuclear energy, new types of plants, gas emissions, funding issues.   Click on the posts and read more!

Carnival of Nuclear Energy 130 at Atomic Insights

Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs #130 is now posted at Atomic Insights.  Rod Adams has posted an important Carnival.  I call it  the low-hazard Carnival. Let's look at some non-hazards.

Two posts (one by me, one podcast including me) describe the non-events of "nuclear plants in the path of Hurricane Sandy."

At ANS Nuclear Cafe, Rod Adams posts a stinging critique of the declared non-scientific bias of the infamous New York Academy report on Chernobyl (which the Academy has semi-repudiated. They sure don't sell it any more.) At his own blog, Rod Adams posts an analysis of a recent study of Leukemia in Chernobyl workers.  Over 100,000 workers, over 20 years later, perhaps 19 extra cases of leukemia.  He notes that nobody in Japan received doses at the levels of the Chernobyl workers.

Les Corrice writes an honest (and therefore reassuring) look at cesium, fuel pools and Fukushima.

Brian Wang, at Next Big Future, describes the coming market for High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors (700 reactors, probably) and the safety of these reactors.

In other posts, I describe the successful Public Service Board (PSB) meeting in Vermont, and Gail Marcus looks at all the clever ways that people can cherry-pick data.

In the Carnival, Rod says something nice about our efforts in Vermont, and I will repeat it here.  Thank you, Rod!

Aside: Meredith’s efforts in Vermont remind me of the story of the The Tortoise and the Hare. Her steady efforts have been increasingly successful. The writeup in the Brattleboro Reformer about the PSB meeting was a great example of how pronuclear activism can work. It mentioned Meredith’s blog. End Aside.

Come to the Carnival! Have fun! Step right up and read about the non-hazards!

Chernobyl and Fukushima: Video by WNA

A recent report was issued by the World Health Organization about health effects from Fukushima Daiichi.  The news is mostly good, but mixed. The bad news is that infants in two areas must be monitored for thyroid cancer because their risk of such cancers may have increased.  For others in Japan and the rest of the word, the report had excellent news: negligible health effects can be expected in the civilian population.

But how do you tell people good news?  Or even mixed news? Or anything except the "worst disaster the world has ever known" fear-mongers?

The World Nuclear Association has made an excellent effort to get the good news out, and this video by the World Nuclear Association is well-made and accurate.

Accurate Versus Believable

However, is accurate the same as believable?  Unfortunately, they are not the same.  I would say this video is accurate, but people will not necessarily believe it.  If I didn't know anything about nuclear energy,  I might watch this video and think:

"Nuclear opponents think that hundreds of thousands of people will die from these accidents, and these proponents think nobody's going to die.  Sounds extreme, both of them.  Sounds like it's all propaganda, from one side or another."

Any of my readers have ideas on how to make this good news more believable?  What parts of this video were convincing, and what parts were less convincing?

I also recommend Rod Adams post about this video: Exaggerated myths about nuclear accidents CAUSE negative health effects.

50th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs

The 50th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is posted at Next Big Future. Several bloggers discuss lessons learned from Fukushima, or Fukushima's probable effect on the future of nuclear energy. Others describe controversies about the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. One blog post at Next Big Future uses Union of Concerned Scientists reasoning (linear no-threshold) for radiation to decide whether commercial aviation or Chernobyl has caused more cancers and killed more people by cancer over the last 25 years. Radiation exposure from people taking airline flights is more deadly by far--with this reasoning. The Union of Concerned Scientists comes up with 9000 excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Same reasoning gives 100,000 deaths from commercial aviation radiation over the same time period. Both sets of reasoning are fallacious. They are built on the Linear No Threshold model.

Once again, the Carnival contains everything. You'll be encouraged as Barton looks forward to molten salt reactors, angered along with Adams as he looks at the NYAS report (it starts with the admission that scientific and statistical methods were not followed), interested in the consolidation of nuclear generating companies in the U. S. (Exelon-Constellation), and eager to follow the latest news from Vermont. Come to the Carnival! Have a good time!

Fukushima Oversimplified and Simplified

We Start with Complete Lack of Clarity

Trying to understand what is going on at Fukushima has not been an easy task. Even after the first weeks, information out of Japan was hard to parse. For example, on April 4, the Capacity Factor blog attempted to understand inconsistent radiation readings in Japan, while on March 27, Cheryl Rofer blogged about the ways radiation measurements could go wrong.

Then there was the entire "tellurium shows there is re-criticality" business.

First, the Japanese reported the presence of tellurium in a water sample.

Second, Arnie Gundersen and others were quick to claim that this proved the reactors had "gone critical" again with a fission chain-reaction.

Third, the Japanese admitted that their measurement was wrong: there was no tellurium present.

The measurement was wrong and Gundersen's re-criticality theory was wrong, too.

In other words, we had a complete lack of clarity.

We Move to Oversimplification

There's a scale, the INES scale, for nuclear accidents. On this scale, Three Mile Island was a 5, and Chernobyl was a 7. Seven is the highest level on the scale. Until April 11, the Fukushima accident level was assigned as a level 5, the same as Three Mile Island (TMI). That was obviously too low an assignment: nobody was evacuated or burned by radioactive water at TMI. Then the Fukushima level was raised to a 7, the highest level possible. Fukushima has only emitted 1/10th the radiation that Chernobyl did. (Also, unlike Chernobyl, nobody has been killed by radiation at Fukushima.) Capacity Factor has an excellent post comparing Fukushima level 7 with Chernobyl level 7.

So, the INES scale has the same rank (7) for two accidents that are an order of magnitude apart in terms of radiation release. However, what about a bigger-than-Chernobyl accident? A two-reactor Chernobyl? That would be an INES 7 also.

Oversimplification.

Real Simplification, Also Known As Clarity

Luckily, in recent days, some clarity has come to general understanding of the Japanese situation. We first moved from complexity to oversimplification, and now we are approaching knowledge.

A wonderful interactive graphic from the New York Times puts many types of earthquake damage on the same graphic (finally!) in a move that Edward Tufte would appreciate.

For our purposes, though, we should look at the "radiation" levels tab of the graph. If you look at a given circle on the map, the color indicates the radiation dosage at that point. Each circle also contains information on the dosage rate, and how long it would take (at that dosage rate) to receive an exposure that:

• equals a chest xray,
• equals the allowed dosage of a United States nuclear worker,
• becomes a dosage at which long-term health effects become more likely.

Furthermore, in the Radiation tab of the Times graphic, there is a slider under View Readings Each Day. If you move the slider to March 17 and then move it forward in time, you can see the overall radiation levels decrease with time. The colors of the dots become less intense. It's a great visual and shows that the radiation is getting under control. Airborne radiation levels are diminishing.

This makes sense, because most of the radiation was released in the early days of the accident.

There's another good source if you want to see the time evolution more directly. The NEI (Nuclear Energy Institute) blog linked to a new graphical blog based on Japanese data sources. This blog has graphs of the main parameters of the reactors over time on one set of charts. For our purposes, another set of charts is more interesting: these charts map the evolution of the radiation levels in Ibaraki prefecture and Tokyo, with a comparison to European background levels.

Once again, the charts show the same clear story of steadily decreasing radiation levels. Radiation spikes at the beginning of the accident, then steady decreases.I have grabbed one of these charts below. As usual, double-click to enlarge it.

Final Clarity?

Final clarity is not available yet. Power has been restored to the Fukushima site, radiation levels off-site are decreasing, the major radiation outflow from the plants now is water, which is intrinsically easier to control than air-borne emissions. But nobody would say that the problems are over.

Fukushima isn't Chernobyl, and it isn't Chernobyl on steroids (as Gundersen predicted) but it is serious. This Fox news clip is not particularly upbeat, but I think it is a good summary of the situation to date.

The graphic at the top of this post is a picture of a snubber at Brown's Ferry. Brown's Ferry is a sister plant of Fukushima and Vermont Yankee. The snubber is isolates vibrations for Unit 1 and is part of the seismic activity safety equipment for the plant. Photo used with permission of TVA.

Eye chart from Wikimedia.

Lessons Learned or Lessons Forgotten?

In some ways, writing a post on Lessons Learned in Japan is completely premature. For example, I was on a conference call yesterday with a knowledgeable person who said we could not use his name, but only his information as background. He said that containment is intact at reactors 1, 2 and 3. I objected that I thought it had been breached at Fukushima 2, in the torus (suppression pool). He said that they had previously thought it had been breached, but now thought it was okay. He talked about pressure readings staying high. Maybe he is right, it wasn't breached. Maybe he is wrong.

We don't know what happened, so how can we learn lessons?

There's a statement: Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread. I shall begin rushing in with some lessons learned and/or forgotten.

Lesson I: Never Say Never

I said that the sequence of events in Japan could never happen here. I got criticized roundly (and correctly) on that. Nuclear opponents, of course, were all over my statement as arrogant. Howard Shaffer, a nuclear supporter, reminded me quite firmly that saying something could "never" happen was not reasonable. If it is not contrary to the laws of physics, it could happen.

Fair enough. I should not have said it. I will say, instead, that we don't face earthquake and tsunami here, as they do in Japan. Also, we have more safeguards than the Japanese plants had, because we did some serious upgrades after 9/11 and these have made a difference. For example, we arranged the situation in our plants so if the plant's own generators were knocked out, diesel generators brought in by the army could be easily put on-line. In Japan, when replacement generators finally arrived, connecting them to pumps continued to be a problem. Rod Adams blog has a short video on this.

I wish there was more information available, but since these upgrades happened under the umbrella of "security" we will probably never know all the specifics. However, several people in the nuclear industry have assured me that some of the problems Japan faced simply will not happen here. When you add those upgrades to the lack of major earthquakes or tsunamis in Vermont, you can get to "probabilities for this type of disaster are extremely low." Which, of course, is different from "never."

I think I made that improvident "never" statement because I was angry at people equating "a hurricane coming up the Connecticut Valley" with the widespread destruction in Japan. This was completely disrespectful to the suffering in Japan.

Lesson 2: Rethink Evacuations

As I have been watching the situation in Japan, I have come to the conclusions that the people who plan for evacuations assume that the major danger is radiological. So if you evacuate a certain zone, you have improved the health and safety of the people in that zone.

In Japan, this has not been true. The entire country is devastated, snow is falling, fuel is low, 400,000 are homeless and many are living in tents. To quote Associated Press yesterday

Heavy snow and bitterly cold conditions continue to add to the misery of thousands of survivors in Japan. With relief efforts hampered, helicopters are being used to fly supplies to several evacuation centres which have been cut off by the snowfall. Plunging temperatures have put many elderly residents in makeshift evacuation centres further at risk....

Doctors Without Borders, the international assistance group, has seen cases of hypothermia, serious dehydration and respiratory diseases in some of the shelters, said the general director of the group's Japan affiliate.

In the face of this situation, I think evacuation for radiological safety should be considered in the light of other dangers the refugees might face. If they are going to end up sleeping in a high school gym and eating casseroles prepared by the members of a local church, that's one thing. If the refugees are going to be sleeping in tents in the snow, with children and old people whose lives are at risk from cold and hunger, that is completely different.

In other words, this is a matter of relative risk. The radiological issues off-site at Chernobyl and in Japan have been possible long-term effects (increased cancer risk, for example). Dying of thirst and hypothermia is an immediate effect. I am not saying: don't evacuate. I am saying: think about the conditions before you start evacuating. The cure may be much worse than the disease.

Well, as long as I have brought up the C-word (Chernobyl) I might as well go on to say that the World Health Organization and U.N. studies showed that the worst health effects of Chernobyl were the despair, dislocation, and alcoholism in its wake. The majority of these mental health problems arose from the despondent feelings of the people who had been displaced from their homes.

So perhaps my comments on the evacuation should be filed under lessons forgotten rather than lessons learned.

Lesson Three: Worst-Case Scenarios are Scenarios, not Facts

Arnie Gundersen said that this accident would be Chernobyl on Steroids. He seems to have no understanding how the graphite fire spread radiation at Chernobyl. He acts as if the same thing is sure to happen with possible fires in small amounts of zirconium in the spent fuel pools. Well, it makes an dramatic scenario, at least.

In a less dramatic experiment in the video below, U of C Berkeley engineers attempt to burn some zirconium cladding (unsuccessfully). They also discusses the difference between the problems at these reactors and Chernobyl.

Note: If the cladding were in contact with water, it could liberate hydrogen and cause a hydrogen explosion. This is not the same as an on-going fire. Here's a link to a cartoon that the Japanese are using to explain the situation to their children. To watch this, you have to be ready for fart and toilet analogies.

End note: I had many excellent and thoughtful comments on my last blog post about Fukushima and Vermont. I do intend to respond. Thank you all for your comments.

First Snow painting from Wikimedia Commons

Chernobyl and the Montshire Museum

This blog is about my experiences with the local Sierra Club and other anti-VY organizations. I conclude the post with some notes about their tactics, and their vulnerabilities.

If you are interested in learning about Chernobyl, let me suggest a posting in the new blog, Nuclear Fissionary.

The Ad

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, a meeting "Voices of Chernobyl" was announced in the local paper, without a clue as to who was sponsoring it. The advertisement said "Should we relicense the (sic) Vermont Yankee" and then urged people to come to a playreading about Chernobyl at the Montshire Museum. The ad had a phone number, no name, no organization except the Montshire was mentioned. I called the phone number, but the person did not answer my question about who was sponsoring the show.

Earlier this year, there was an odd advertisement for a "debate" in Putney which was not a debate at all. I resolved to look into this Montshire meeting. Who was doing this? And how did they get it into the Montshire?

The Meeting

As soon as I got to the Montshire, I was greeted by Denis Rydjeski, the president of the local Sierra Club and recent organizer of an anti-Vermont Yankee letter writing bee. A Sierra Club banner hung from the table at the back of the room. As I walked in, Denis praised my blog and thanked me for coming to the meeting.

I asked why the meeting had not been announced as a Sierra Club meeting, and he answered that he had carelessly forgotten to mention it in the paper. There were two areas in the paper where the meeting was announced. A paid ad, and a "calendar of events" announcement. In both places, only the Montshire was named.

Actually, the meeting had a lot of sponsors and a list of sponsors was given to everyone who attended:

• Sierra Club
• Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance
• Citizens Awareness Network
• Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG)
• The Lintilhac Foundation
• The Harris and Frances Block Foundation.

The play about Chernobyl was pretty much as you would expect, so I won't waste your time.

After the play various people spoke.

• My friend (and occasional co-blogger) Howard Shaffer bravely and effectively explained the difference between Chernobyl and boiling water reactors. The moderator asked him to stop talking because he was taking up too much time.
• Chris Williams of Vermont Citizen's Action Network stated that people who don't believe Chernobyl killed vast numbers of people are like Holocaust deniers, and these people have to be confronted.
• Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear explained that the material in the core at Vermont Yankee isn't surrounded by graphite which can burn, but the core material could escape from containment and enter the air as an aerosol, doing just as much damage as Chernobyl. He didn't happen to mention what would turn the core into aerosols.

The back table at the Montshire was covered with brochures (single color and glossy), pamphlets, bumper stickers shut it down now!, anti-Yankee campaign buttons, and lists of legislators to contact. I have but one regret...that I didn't take a camera. The sponsor list and the table were anti-nuke dreams come true. All the literature was aimed at influencing the legislators to vote against the renewal of the Vermont Yankee license. This was a political meeting with a clear political agenda, two days before the Senate vote.

I wondered how the Montshire felt about this. Or do they know?

The Montshire

Some background. Last summer the Coalition for Energy Solutions gave a public talk at the Montshire, and I was one of the organizers. I went to the administrator in charge of scheduling, and told her the Coalition wanted to use a room at the Montshire. We wanted to talk about conservation, and about Vermont Yankee.

The woman in charge of scheduling was very clear that the second talk was not welcome...the Montshire did not host anything political. Anything political goes against their guidelines for hosting non-profits.

The Director, or his designee, has authority to decline or cancel any event that adversely affects the Montshire’s neutral stance on political, social, environmental or economic issues.

The Director

Since the "Director, or his designee" has the power to control the types of meetings that are held at the Montshire, I called the Director the day after the Chernobyl meeting.

I spoke to David Goudy, director of the Montshire museum. He was very thoughtful, and said that the person who told me that I couldn't speak about Vermont Yankee last summer was just plain wrong. He would welcome me holding a meeting about Vermont Yankee, and it would not violate the Montshire charter to discuss the political implications of an energy source. However, they don't host political meetings at the Montshire. No rallies for candidates or anything like that.

I mentioned (well, more than mentioned) that I thought the advertising reflected badly on the Montshire. It looked like the Montshire was not only hosting a political meeting, but sponsoring it. Goudy said that he and the staff had been concerned by the ads. The ads looked as if the meeting were a museum event. He said he had planned to take (or had taken, I'm not sure) some action about preventing this sort of thing in the future, even before I had called.

For the Future

In some ways, ths is old news. The early "don't talk about Vermont Yankee at the Montshire" was a mistake, and the Montshire director wasn't happy with the Sierra Club ads. It was all a mistake, it won't happen again, and it's all no-problemo.

For the future, though, we should keep track of these things. Misleading advertising (It's a debate! or At the Montshire!) appears to be a tactic of the anti-nuclear groups. With misleading ads, they can hold political meetings in venues where the tax status and charter might say that political meetings cannot be held. So, if we can prove it, we can politely bring this to the attention of the directors of the venues. "Are political meetings okay here? Because one was just held..."

In my opinion, the anti-s are putting some of our best institutions in a vulnerable position, and we have to defend those institutions. The government is loaded with debt, and looking eagerly for revenue sources. Don't let the new source be your local museum or library. Fight misleading ads whenever you encounter them.

The Sound and the Fury and Some News

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The Sound

Macbeth was talking about his life, but he could have been talking about the upcoming Vermont Yankee relicensing vote.

Yesterday, my local paper had a top-of-the front page article: Many Vt Senators in the Valley Say They'll Vote Aganist Vt Yankee The article was in the Valley News Friday February 19, and was written by John Gregg. In this article, Senator Mark MacDonald says

"I think we'll vote no, and I don't think it will be close." However, a few sentences later, the article says "MacDonald also said a no vote was not necessarily a 'stake in the heart' of Vermont Yankee's future, since a vote in favor of Vermont Yankee could still potentially occur in 2011 or 2012. The company might also still take the matter to court."

(This paper does not keep a strong archive on-line, and this link may go dead fairly quickly. I have quoted the important part.)

In other words, the upcoming vote is advisory. A "no" vote would certainly be a set-back for Entergy. If the split takes place completely along party lines, a 23 to 7 vote would be a major setback. But, despite all this excitement, the vote means very little. The legislature can chose to vote the opposite way next year. Or the whole matter can go to court instead of being voted upon.

By the way, as usual in politics, the vote situation is not intuitively obvious. The bill that will be voted on would instruct the Public Service Board (PSB) to allow Vermont Yankee to operate past 2012. If the Senate votes no, the House does not see the bill, and the PSB is not instructed to renew Vermont Yankee's license. So, if they vote "no"- -basically, nothing happens. The PSB is not instructed in any way, though a 2006 law, passed by the Vermont legislature, says PSB must be instructed by the legislature in order to rule that continued operation of Vermont Yankee is in the best interests of Vermont.

I think this is going to be settled in court, but that is another blog post entirely.

The Fury

Anti-Vermont Yankee efforts have been stepped up. For example, there have been ads and announcements in our local paper that the following event is taking place: (quoted from Valley News Calendar)

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, play reading and discussion by theater professionals and community leaders of the one-act play: 7 p.m., Montshire Museum of Science, 1 Montshire Road, Norwich. Free. Refreshments provided. 802-885-4826 or drr@dartmouth.edu.

In an ad for the performance, the title is "Should the (sic) Vermont Yankee be re-licensed."

I called the number, and discovered that this play is written by a Vermont woman and is being performed throughout Vermont, with "nuclear experts" in the audience. In speaking to Mr. Belenky on the phone, he assured me that these experts would have arguments that I would find "hard to counter." Unfortunately, I messed up the phone conversation by saying that I didn't really want to talk much about this, we wouldn't have much to say to each other, but I wanted to know more about the performances. This gave him the perfect opening to explain how everyone has to be open to dialog, and he never heard of someone saying something like this about a conversation etc.

This was my bad. It was completely my bad. I don't know why I am writing it here. Self-flagellation, I guess. Admission that I am suffering from a bit of burn-out. I do try to have a dialog. I really do. But a person can hear this junk about an RBMK reactor being just like a LWR reactor only so many times. I think I have heard it enough.

The charter of the Montshire Museum does not allow it to host political meetings. So I suppose this playreading about Chernobyl-and-Vermont-Yankee is considered educational.

Tomorrow afternoon, there's a big anti-VY meeting in Brattleboro, with a full cast of anti-VY groups. Here's the list from that announcement

Paul Gunter, executive director of the Washington, D.C., -based nuclear watchdog group, Beyond Nuclear;
David Dean, Vermont State Representative and Riverkeeper for the Connecticut River Watershed Council;
Clifford Hatch, organic farmer in Gill, Mass.;
Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility;
Deborah Katz, executive director of Citizens Awareness Network;
Clay Turnbull, staff member of the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution; and
Chris Williams, organizer, Vermont Citizen Action Network.

Chris Williams used to be with Citizens Awareness Network. I think the Vermont Citizen Action Network is relatively new. Some of the Usual Suspects are not attending the rally tomorrow. VPIRG and the Union of Concerned Scientists seem to be missing. We face quite a crew around here.

And they are well-funded. There was a half-page, full color ad opposite the opinion page in our local paper, with the usual cooling tower picture and exhortations to write your legislature. I am sure this ad appeared in all local Vermont newspapers. Meanwhile, in electronic media, anything with the word nuclear triggers a Google Adsense ad to shut Vermont Yankee. I see this on most of the pro-nuclear blogs I read.

We are such a small state. 700,000 people, and not growing. Where does all this money come from?

Old News Or New?

Arnie Gundersen wrote a note about a phone call from an anonymous whistle blower claiming that Vermont Yankee repaired a leak in the same area two years ago. Vermont Digger has the story. I link to the document obtained from the Department of Public Service. This story will be heavily covered in future days, no doubt. We have faith that Mr. Gundersen is not being devious or dumb in sharing his report of the phone call.