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?

Entergy Conference Call: Vermont Yankee is a well-run plant!

A few days ago, Entergy announced its third-quarter earnings and The Street published a transcript of its earnings-report conference call.  The transcript is quite long.  I decided to use some quotes from it as my blog post.

My conclusion: Vermont Yankee employees can be VERY proud of the operation of this plant!

In the quotes below, the speaker is Leo Denault, Chairman and CEO of Entergy. I have made some additions for clarity: additions are in parentheses. Material in bold was also added by the blogger.

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Vermont Yankee running very well, breaker to breaker

At Entergy Wholesale Commodities operational performance was once again strong. As I noted earlier, our plants ran well. For example, the extended outage at FitzPatrick came in below the shorter end of our expectations and at VY our employees have kept the plant running for nearly 600 consecutive days now. Remarkably they are on their fourth breaker to breaker run.

But in fact all of our EWC plants play important roles in their respective regions and communities.....

About the plant closure

Let me now turn to Vermont Yankee since I know a lot of you will have questions about its closure. As you may know, in September the plant began its coast down to permanent shutdown which will occur at the end of the year. Last month, as we said we would, Entergy delivered a first of its kind site assessment study to the state of Vermont.....

Using conservative estimates about the growth of the (decommissioning) trust we think it will have enough money to begin such (major) activities in the next 25 to 35 years. At this point we don't expect to add funds into the trust to meet NRC financial assurance requirements.

A tough decision, but the economics were bad

The decision to close the plant was tough. It came with certain risks and challenges. But we planned to meet and manage these challenges thoughtfully which I think we have.

For example, we obtained an order from the Vermont Public Service Board authorizing VY to operate through the end of the fourth quarter. We targeted elimination of overhead associated with the plant and replaced the majority of Vermont Yankee employees wanting to stay with the company in new roles. It is worth reiterating that this was the right decision.

First, we now see an incremental benefit of shutdown versus continued operation of an additional $50 million through 2017. And second, despite the upturn in forward power prices in New England over the past year, economics for VY would still not be sustainable in the long run.

One reason why Pilgrim is different: Capacity Markets

Forward capacity market improvement, through the newly defined constrained zone that spans southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is improving the revenue outlook at Pilgrim and RISEC, but VY would not have benefited from this new capacity zone.

Vermont Yankee Will Refuel!

I was wrong. In a post a few hours ago, I said that I predicted that Entergy would not order fuel for the October outage. I thought they would look at Judge Murtha's ruling denying Entergy an injunction. I thought they would decide that the positive things Murtha said about their main case were not grounds enough to place a $60 million dollar bet by ordering fuel.

This morning, Entergy announced that it will order fuel to be loaded in the October outage.

Reading the Entergy press release, it is clear that Entergy did not base their decision on a tea-leaf analysis of Judge Murtha's words about the injunction. Instead, Entergy's assessed the strength of their own case. Good for them!

Entergy looked at the big picture and the law itself. Meanwhile, I let myself get caught up in microscopic examination of Murtha's statements and whether Murtha's statements were enough basis for ordering fuel.

I am glad to have been wrong about this! I am glad Entergy is ordering fuel!

(Also, I would not recommend hiring me as a fortune teller. If you were thinking of doing so, don't do it.)

Part of the press release is quoted below:

New Orleans, La. – Today Entergy Corporation (NYSE: ETR) communicated to its employees that the company's board of directors voted to approve the fabrication of fuel and the refueling of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in October. This will be the plant's 29th refueling.

While the company has received a 20-year license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state of Vermont has refused to grant a certificate of public good to continue operating beyond March 21, 2012. That issue is currently being litigated before the U.S. District Court for the state of Vermont.

"Entergy's board of directors carefully reviewed the merits of our case and the arguments put forth by all parties during the recent hearing in District Court when we requested a preliminary injunction against the state of Vermont taking any actions to close Vermont Yankee," said J. Wayne Leonard, Entergy's chairman and chief executive officer. "Our board believes both the merits of the company's legal position and the record strongly support its decision to continue to trial scheduled to begin on Sep. 12. On that basis, the decision was made to move forward with the refueling as planned."