A nuclear power plant (NOT Vermont Yankee)

In 13 months of existence, the News Guy has so far declined to deal with one of Vermont’s most important and most contentious issues: what to do about Vermont Yankee.

The subject has not been inadvertently overlooked; it has been deliberately avoided for two reasons.

The first is that the debate over re-licensing the nuclear power plant in Vernon for another 20 years has hardly been ignored by Vermont’s established news organizations. Sometimes it seems as though no one at the plant can sneeze without the Brattleboro Reformer, the Burlington Free Press and VPR recording how many co-workers said, “God Bless You,” and seeking comment from VY’s owner, the Louisiana-based Entergy Company.

Considering that one reason for the News Guy’s existence is to cover what others do not, not covering what others do made sense.

The second reason is that this dispute is both financially and scientifically complicated, and that one ought to know what one is talking about before talking about it.

That this precept is not universally followed renders it no less worthy.

Just how dangerous are those dry casks of nuclear waste stored at the plant site? How hard would it be to replace the power Yankee produces annually? Will that one-degree increase in the Connecticut River’s temperature degrade the river’s ecological integrity? Does the spinoff of Yankee to a new, highly leveraged, company mean Vermont taxpayers are likely to be stuck with the cost of shutting the plant down?

Because the policy here holds that knowing what you’re talking about involves more than just quoting the (often shrilly expressed) opinions on both sides of the debate, answering those questions and more would take more time than has been available. Hence the absence of Vermont Yankee coverage.

By now, though, enough of that information has been gathered to probe into some of the politics and economics (if not the nuclear physics) of the Vermont Yankee dispute. Besides, in recent days, the political aspect has moved center-stage, allowing the political observer to comment with more authority.

Actually, the tumult of the last few days has inspired some exceptions to one of the most obvious political facts of the Yankee debate – its tribalism. An outspoken Vermont Yankee supporter is likely to be…well, let’s just say a proper person (and, yes, we’re engaging in a little simplistic stereotyping here, just to make the point quickly). Possibly a Republican, but at any rate a pro-establishment sort, someone who admires – or at least is not bothered by – large corporations, the consumer culture, suburbia.

But find a populist Vermonter (left or right) who rails against corporate dominance, gas-guzzling vehicles, and consumerism, and who has some counter-cultural sympathies, it’s a probable twelve-to-seven that he or she wants Vermont Yankee shut down yesterday.

On neither side of the divide is anyone likely to change his or her mind because of anything as trivial as evidence.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty foolish foundation on which to conduct an important discussion.

Herewith, then, the first of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: It is entirely possible to be a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent, well-meaning, public-spirited person and be in favor of relicensing VY for anther 20 years.

Or to be against it.

And that’s because of the second of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: Everyone living in Vermont now or who gets born or moves into it over the next 20 years can live healthy, prosperous (and electrically-powered) lives if the plant shuts down in 2012 or earlier.

Or if it continues to operate for another 20 years.

Which is not to say that the choice is not consequential, merely that it is not cataclysmic. Without Vermont Yankee, electricity might cost more, and Vermonters in effect might have to burn more coal, producing more greenhouse gas. (“In effect,” because Vermonters wouldn’t themselves burn the coal; it would be burned for them to provide some of the power now produced by Yankee).

If the plant continues to operate, it will continue to produce some radiation pollution. Then there is the danger, minimal but potentially catastrophic, of leakage from those storage casks. (But that danger already exists, from the gunk already there. Whether another 20 years worth substantively enhances the danger is one of those scientific questions this site is not yet competent to answer).

These are the kinds of choices societies have to make these days, and, as stated above, are matters on which decent and reasonable people can disagree. In an ideal world – or even a reasonable one – they would disagree civilly and rationally.

A challenge rendered more difficult by passions on both sides, but especially these days by the conduct of the plant’s owners, whereupon we come to the Third conclusion about the Vermont Yank debate: Entergy officials may be competent managers of an efficient and safe power plant. But when it comes to dealing with the public, they…well, to clean up the line Lyndon Johnson (unfairly) used about Gerald Ford, they can’t find their collective behind with both hands.

A reality evident even before this latest debacle about the underground pipes and lying to the authorities. There was the collapsing water tower in 2007, the inadequate studies about the safety of the waste storage, the failure to follow the Public Service Board’s order requiring it to monitor radiation levels in the spent fuel containers, its procrastination in making a price offer to the utility distributing companies.

Then consider the company’s new advertising campaign, the one highlighting the fact that 650 people work at the plant.

As they do. But half of them live in Massachusetts. And if they were all Vermonters? They would comprise some three tenths of one percent of all the jobs in the state. The people of Vermont don’t rely on Yankee to provide jobs. They rely on it to provide clean, reliable, inexpensive electricity. Sometimes, marketing “experts” can be too cute for their own good.

Then of course we come to the latest fiasco. ‘Oh, we do have radioactive material in underground pipes after all, even though we said we didn’t; even though we said it under oath.’ (But using words perhaps designed to avoid to perjury. “I don’t believe there is active piping service today carrying radionuclides under ground,” said Entergy Vice President Jay Thayer. It’s all but impossible to prove that a person did not “believe” what he said he did at any moment).

It’s as though nobody ever told these guys that the best – actually, the only – way to appear to be transparent is to…(hold your breath here for the shock)…be transparent. It’s a public process. You can never be sure of not getting caught if you say something false. Ergo, say nothing false.

In all likelihood, then, most Vermonters now view Vermont Yankee as a company from which they would not buy a used car, were it in the car business, because: (a) they wouldn’t trust it not to have rolled back the odometer; and (b) they wouldn’t be sure it knew how to roll back the odometer without rolling it forward by mistake.

That explains why even a whole lot of pro-corporate establishment types are turning against Yankee relicensing. See Sunday’s Free Press editorial. See also the angry statements from top officials of Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration, clearly expressing the governor’s views. If anyone has the right to be angry at Yankee, it is Douglas. He’s supported it all the way. Now it has sandbagged him.

To render this judgment, one needs no scientific expertise, and the company has only itself to blame.

Some unrelated information and commentary to end the week…(and, yes, to those of you who asked, the News Guy is almost fully recovered from the mid-week attack of the ague)

A reasonable person  might almost sympathize with Burlington Police Cpl. Paul Glynn for arresting 21-year-old Darin Cassler Monday for the crime of organizing and engaging in the well-known felony of pillow-fighting.

Put yourself in the position of a police officer walking down the Church Street mall and all of a sudden coming upon a veritable regiment (48-strong, according to published reports) of young folks who might have been clogging the street, but who were at any rate obviously organized, not to mention armed.

OK, armed with pillows, not usually considered a lethal weapon. But you never know. Faced with what must have been an unprecedented (for everyone, not just him) spectacle, Cpl. Glynn appears to have fallen back on a cop’s instinctive reaction: Arrest Somebody.

The reason for the sympathy is that the rest of the Burlington and Chittenden County law enforcement establishment clearly recognized that he had over-reacted. In this case, being (at least so it seems) ridiculed by his peers would be sufficient punishment, especially because the charges against Cassler were dropped. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were never really picked up.

Of course, the police department, being a police department, in announcing that the young man would not be prosecuted, had to put out a stern statement, warning that “these types of events can have collateral/negative impact on the area in which they are held.”

Were there any reason to take such statements seriously to begin with it might be tempting to try to find some meaning in this one. Happily, there is not.

Do you suppose it’s possible that Entergy Vermont Yankee actually hires the folks who protest against it?

Probably not. But how else explain how the nuclear power plant’s most recent antagonists have been its best friends?

First, at a meeting in Brattleboro, a Massachusetts woman named Sally Shaw (all this courtesy of the Brattleboro Reformer story by Bob Audette), who belongs to an anti-nuclear group called the New England Coalition, threw some compost at Michael Colomb, a Vermont Yankee Vice President.

Presumably there was some symbolic point to the use of what Shaw called “really good quality compost.” If so, the point is too subtle for some of us to grasp, making the  childishness of the gesture even more obvious.

Then there was the complaint by the New England Coalition  asking Attorney General William Sorrell to investigate the relationship between Vermont Yankee lobbyist Jay Thayer and Commissioner David O’Brien of the Department of Public Service.

On its face, this is not entirely a frivolous suggestion. O’Brien’s department regulates Thayer’s company. Keeping an arms length relationship between the two of them would probably be a good idea. So O’Brien might have been well advised not to invite Thayer to a Christmas party in Stowe last December. He invited him anyway.

But Shay Totten provided the world with that information in his Seven Days column on January 21. Asked for further evidence of questionable O’Brien-Thayer contact, Clay Turnbull of the  Coalition could only say that O’Brien seems to give Vermont Yankee everything it desires.

True enough. Still, one invitation to a fairly large gathering (it wasn’t a two-man tete-a-tete) seems scant evidence of impropriety, as Sorrell immediately noted. (Friday morning update: Sorrell has officially rejected the request to conduct an investigation) Pressure groups, like investigative reporters, should pay attention to the My Darling Clementine Rule, based on one of the great lines from that great 1946 movie: “When you draw a gun, kill a man.”

Today’s theme seems to combine possibly imprudent political protest with arguably unnecessary law enforcement. Let’s wrap them together at the University of Vermont, where 100 students protested academic budget cuts with a sit-in Wednesday afternoon, and 26 Friday morning update: or 31, or perhaps 33) were arrested when they refused to leave that night. (Apparently only one was taken into custody; the others were given citations).

There are roughly 10,000 undergraduates at UVM. If this pocket calculator is correct, that means about one (1) percent of the students support the faculty union, United Academics (of which News Guy, a very part-time adjunct at UVM, is a member), in opposing faculty layoffs. Instead, the union argues, the university should save money by getting rid of some of its highly paid top managers, or at least cutting their pay.

Faced with a one percent turnout, the student and/or union leaders might have wondered whether going ahead with the protest demonstration would demonstrate more weakness than protest.

But let’s admire their tenacity, if not their wisdom. Off they went, and some of them refused to leave the president’s wing of Waterman Hall, the University administration building, when ordered to do so by the police (whose boss is Gary Margolis; no relation if anyone wondered). Meaning they were probably guilty of trespass, meaning arresting them was legally justified.

But maybe not smart. According to all the reports, the students weren’t hurting anything. This was not like Columbia University in 1968 when students trashed offices, destroyed property, and defaced books. This demonstration was arguably pointless and juvenile. It wasn’t dangerous. Arresting the demonstrators made the demonstration seem stronger than it was.  Leaving the kids in there, possibly to get bored and tired and drift out one by one, would have accentuated the ineptitude of the demonstration. Arresting them could arouse sympathy for them. The headline becomes “student arrested” instead of “demonstration fizzles.”

But you know what they say. Sometimes all that edjy-kay-shun gets in the way of common sense.

Oh, and speaking of education, the Greek whose last words asked a friend to make a sacrifice on his bahalf to Asklepios, the god of healing, was not Spiro Agnew. It was Socrates (up top; a photo of a statue in the Louvre), who just after drinking the hemlock, but before it had taken full effect, said (according to Plato), “Crito, I owe a cock to Asklepius. Will you see that the debt is paid”?

Vermont is content with everything, even skinny dipping.

Well, maybe with everything except its nuclear power plant.

Such was the message of Town Meeting Day 2009, on which incumbents were re-elected, school budgets were approved, social service agencies got as much money as they did last year (or sometimes more), and one of the few spending proposals rejected was the one designed to stop folks from swimming bare naked in Lake Willoughby.

Granted, some of the votes were close, including the re-election of Bob Kiss as mayor of Burlington. Still, the overall picture the state presented to itself was one of satisfaction with the status quo.

In  Burlington, voters were satisfied not just with their mayor but also with the unusual and still somewhat controversial voting system used to elect him. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) is not without its drawbacks. In this case though, whining from some quarters notwithstanding, it worked as it is supposed to work. It elected the candidate who would have won in a non-instant runoff, which would have been much more expensive.

Just look at the arithmetic. After the first round of counting, Republican Kurt Wright was the first choice of a plurality of voters, 2,951, 35.2 percent) (all figures from the Burlington Free Press). Kiss was second with 2,585 (30.8 percent), Democrat Andy Montroll was third with 1,497 (17.8 percent), Independent Dan Smith had 1,306  (15.6 percent) and Green Party candidate James Simpson had all of 35 votes (less than half a percent).

The way it works, Smith and Simpson are then eliminated, and the second choices of their supporters allocated to the remaining candidates. More of them went to Montroll or Kiss instead of Wright. Even so, Wright maintained the plurality, about 39 percent to 36 percent for Kiss, though still far short of the majority required by law.

Proceed to count number three. Now Montroll is eliminated and the second choices of his supporters allocated to the two survivors. They went overwhelmingly to Kiss, 1.332 to 767.

What this means is that in a traditional run-off – one held in two or three weeks – Kiss would almost certainly have beaten Wright, assuming of course that the same people went to the polls. Experience shows that they don’t, that turnout in the runoff is much lower. That likelihood – and saving money – are two advantages of IRV. (The disadvantages, which are complicated and take a while to explain, will be dealt with in a later post).

Meanwhile, in the rest of the state, where people voted the old-fashioned way, they mostly voted yes. Despite the worst economic prospects since the 1930s, despite complaints led by Gov. Jim Douglas that the schools are spending too much money, nothing even close to a taxpayers revolt against school budgets emerged from the meetings.

There were a few budget defeats. As usual, Springfield voted down the projected school spending plan the first time. It called for a hefty six percent spending hike. But Burlington easily passed its budget, with a 9.1 spending increase, on top of approving a $9.7 million school repair bond issue. All around the state, budget approvals far outnumbered rejections.

As noted here the other day (Anybody Around Here Seen a Revolt?, March 3), most school budgets went up by far less than they did last year, so the economy and the complaints may have played a pre-emptive role. But it was interesting that even on non-school issues – the various proposals to fund libraries and private, non-profit health and social service agencies – most town meetings gave what was asked if not more. For the nonce, at least, Vermonters do not seem to be responding to the recession by growing tightfisted. Generosity appeared to be the order of the day in regard to just about everything.

Except maybe the Entergy Nuclear company’s Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. At last count, 33 towns passed a resolution calling on the plant to shut down when its current license expires in 2012 instead of getting permission to operate for another 20 years. Three towns defeated the resolution and one tabled it.

Add up the total populations of those 33 towns and you get… not very many people. Add up all the town meeting-goers and you get many fewer. As mentioned here three days ago (Town Meeting: The Pros and Cons. March 2), town meeting results are an invalid measurement of statewide public opinion, which can be determined only by a statewide random sample poll. No such poll has been taken since the most recent manifestations of Vermont Yankee’s gross incompetence. But no doubt it would show far more support for the power plant than the town meetings did.

Which does not render Tuesday’s results meaningless. Determined, well-organized minorities can and do exercise disproportionate power in American democracy. The determination and the organizational effectiveness of the anti-Yankee faction can no longer be doubted. Besides, opposition to continued operation of the plant has now become respectable. Opponents may still be a minority, but no longer, it seems, a fringe.

And speaking of fringes, to the distress of the puritan element and the delight of the sensualists (or perhaps just the free-thinkers) the Westmore Town Meeting rejected a proposal to spend $25,000 to buy the electronic monitors needed to enforce a law – which does not exist – against bathing in the all-together on Lake Willoughby’s Southwest Beach.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars added onto our tax bill, this is where we should cut,” Bob Decker, Westmore’s delinquent tax collector, told the Barton Chronicle.

But it wasn’t just the money. In the Northeast Kingdom, there’s an open preference for leaving people alone to live as they choose. And, just possibly, a hidden delight in maintaining the local naughtiness.