Save a Millirem, and the Carnival

Carnival #145 is up at Atomic Power Review.  Will Davis starts with his usual teaser picture from his amazing archives. Then the Carnival begins, and it is lots of fun. Nuclear in space, old films about the "romance of radium" for medical treatment, a critique of the State of the Union speech (guess which type of energy was invisible, unnamed, etc), and an update on the Diary of a Nuclear Tourist from Suzy Hobbs Baker in Europe.  Come, read, enjoy!

Also, in honor of the refueling, I include a favorite video.

Drum roll!  Outage being planned!

Time to Save A Millirem!

Enjoy it all!

Rally This Sunday in Support of Vermont Yankee

Rally in Support of Nuclear Power

Supporters of Vermont Yankee to hold rally Sunday, Oct. 23 outside the plant gates

On Sunday, October 23, from 4:30 – 6:30 pm outside the front gate at Vermont Yankee, there will be a rally of support for the plant staff and the outage team.

“We need to show them that they are appreciated,” said co-organizer Meredith Angwin, director of the Energy Education Project of the Ethan Allen Institute. “We will show our support for nuclear energy!”

“Why are we doing this now? Partially because of the outage: we want to support the plant and the workers. Also, the following weekend, an opponent group is holding a shut-it-down rally at the plant,” Angwin said. “We discussed holding our rally the same day to provide balance, but decided that was a bad idea. Multiple rallies held near the plant gates can raise security issues. So we are holding our rally this weekend.”

"The people working the outage will appreciate our support," said co-organizer Howard Shaffer, coordinator of the Vermont Pilot Project of the American Nuclear Society. "We are grateful to Entergy for giving us permission to be at the Governor Hunt House for the rally."

Contact:

Howard Shaffer

Vermont Pilot Project of the American Nuclear Society

hshaffer3@myfairpoint.net

603-632-5139

or

Meredith Angwin

Energy Education Project of the Ethan Allen Institute

Meredith@ethanallen.org

802-291-9172

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This is a press release I sent out earlier today. Last time we held a rally, we were in downtown Brattleboro near the Federal Court House. This time, we wanted our rally to be visible to people at the plant.

About the Governor Hunt House. It was built in 1789 by Governor Hunt, who was the last Lieutenant Governor of the independent Republic of Vermont. It is now near the gate to Vermont Yankee.

Photos below of the house. (From the Restoration Trades Directory Portfolio)

Songs for the Outage: Save a Millirem, and Don't Stand So Close

Songs for the Outage

Vermont Yankee is in the middle of the much-discussed refueling outage: Would they or wouldn't they load fuel? Nobody knew for sure.

Vermont Yankee is loading fuel. They are doing it. Hundreds of people are working hundreds of hours. Sometimes it feels like each individual person is working hundreds of hours. I decided to honor everyone working the outage at Vermont Yankee with Songs for An Outage.

Fifty Ways to Save a Millirem

The first song: Fifty Ways to Save a Millirem, was on my blog before, on the post, Vernon, New Hampshire? (That post suggested that Vernon secede from Vermont.) Here's the song again.

Don't Stand So Close

Here's another song, Don't Stand So Close, this time by the Rad Police (as opposed to The Police). I can't make out some of the lyrics, so if someone can hear them more clearly, please send the lyrics as a comment to this blog.



Have a great Refueling, Vermont Yankee!

Three Views of the Outage

The First View: Business is Booming in Brattleboro

Vermont Yankee is on a refueling outage, and business is booming in Brattleboro. This video shows people in Brattleboro who own small businesses, and are happy with the lively days and free-flowing money of the nuclear workers coming into town for the outage. They are happy with the plant, too.

This is a group that doesn't go to Vermont Yankee hearings in the evenings. This is a group you seldom see on TV.




(If you can't access the embedded video, you should be able to link to it here.)

The Second View: Hatred of the Plant and Its People

Not everyone in Brattleboro likes the plant or its people.

On the "Save Vermont Yankee" group page in Facebook, Entergy employee Theresa Derting had this post:

Went to a local hardware store today and bought some last-minute supplies for the outage, used my company credit card, and got sneered at by the guy taking my money. Guess who won't go back there?

(I have Ms. Dertling's permission to use this post in my blog.)

I would like to think that being sneered at because you work for Entergy is an unusual occurrence in Brattleboro, but it isn't. Brattleboro votes against Vermont Yankee. Brattleboro sent two of the most fervent anti-VY people (Rep. Sarah Edwards and Pro Temp Peter Shumlin) to the Statehouse. A constant stream of anti-VY letters-to-the-editor in the Brattleboro paper serve to infuriate or depress plant employees in Vernon. The people at the plant call the Brattleboro paper the Mis-Informer and many of them refuse to read it.

Emails

Plant employees are often treated like pariahs. My evidence comes from emails that I have received, and postings on the Save Vermont Yankee page of Facebook.

• One Entergy employee said that when the employees went to Montpelier last May, senators and representatives "seemed to be avoiding us."
• Another employee emailed me that she frequently feels like crying, because her family is from the area and she feels so many of the locals hate the employees.
• An employee of nuclear plant in the South visited VY to do some benchmarking. She emailed me that felt she didn't want to admit that she worked at the plant while she was in downtown Brattleboro. She felt very uncomfortable.

I have more examples, but in the interest of length, I will stop here.

In an earlier post, I talked about the two cultures, and people at the plant and anti-nuclear people were unlikely to see eye to eye. In the VPR article about the two cultures, people at the plant talked of their jobs, church and families. Some spoke of feeling unwelcome. In contrast, anti-nuclear people spoke of their fears that something would go wrong at the plant and hurt them. Different issues for the different groups. The article on two cultures is well worth reading.

Brattleboro is Southern Vermont

This is hard to write, because most people (at the plant, in Brattleboro) are good people and treat each other well. Yet there is a significant minority in Brattleboro who are happy to marginalize plant employees and temporary workers. Some of these people treat VY employees as non-people who have no feelings, and generally act as if the people of Brattleboro are the ruling class and the people of Vernon are.....

Hey, I'll go further. I'll say what I mean. Some anti-nuclear people in Brattleboro act as if they are the whites in the pre-integration South.

The whites in the pre-integration South were top dogs. They were defending their way of life from interlopers and frightening possibilities. The whites of the Old South were sure they were right, and they were highly self-righteous. They weren't shy about keeping the "others" in their place with interruptions and other methods of showing that the words and actions of the marginalized people didn't count for much. They were proud of these actions.

It sounds familiar.

This attitude is not universal among the anti-nuclear people in Brattleboro, and most people on both sides of the fence are basically good-hearted. But I would be lying if I said that scorn of plant workers is uncommon in Brattleboro.

The Third View: The View from Montpelier

Outages are scheduled, plant project charts are prepared, but Montpelier goes right ahead with its agenda.

If you remember, in a post about Old Tritium and New Problems, I described how the Conservation Law Foundation had persuaded (or maybe forced) the Public Service Board to open up a whole new docket about Vermont Yankee, docket 7600. This docket is not about license renewal; it's about shutting the plant down early due to the leak of tritiated water. In my February 27 post, I suggested that the leak would be found and fixed before the new docket could get underway.

I was right, but mere facts can't stop a docket. There's been all sorts of flapping around because the various intervenor consultants on that docket want to visit VY and see the holes and the remediation. They want to come, outage or no outage. The consultants can't re-arrange their schedules. Also, it is possible that the remediation work could finish during the outage and the consultants wouldn't get to see it. The consultants will visit Thursday, April 29, during the outage. The Burlington Free Press blogged about this. The Public Service Board interviewed all stakeholders and issued a Board Order. The visit will happen despite the outage.

Parking on site will be a problem, due to hundreds of extra workers. Security may also be a problem. The visitors will have to carpool from an off-site parking lot. I am sure this will work out fine, with only minimum inconvenience to the intervenors.

End Note:

Tamar Cerafici has an excellent post today about the communications issues at Vermont Yankee. My friend Tamar is a lawyer who lives in New Hampshire.