Our legislators all have other jobs – they’re farmers and business people, professors and attorneys. There’s a law on the books that says a person cannot be fired from his or her day job because she or he is attending to legislative duties. Wealthy professionals are over-represented in the Vermont legislature, but show me a legislature where they’re not. All in all, I think we do pretty well.

Still, I sense an unvoiced inferiority complex when it comes to our legislature. We have New York just to the west and Massachusetts to the south and while we all thank good fortune every day that we are not those states, there’s a certain junior varsity air to the whole undertaking.

So what? The point of a legislature is not offices and staffers or worse, to provide a space for lobbyists to hang out all the year through. The point is to make good government and then go home. That’s what the Vermont legislature does in 16 weeks (more or less) each year.

Yesterday, the Vermont Senate, on a vote of 26-4, became to first legislative body in America to close a nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, which is owned by the Entergy Corporation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

The plant, first opened in 1972, is scheduled to close in 2012. Entergy Louisiana, which bought Vermont Yankee in 2002, wanted the legislature to extend its permission to operate another 20 years.

The Louisiana folks have – to be honest – run the place into the ground. A cooling tower collapse, a transformer fire, a crane dropping high-level radioactive waste, missing fuel rods – it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

The latest fiasco has been leaks of tritium and cobalt-60 that Entergy cannot neither find nor plug for the last seven weeks. We do know the leak is from an underground pipe – a pipe Entergy Louisiana officials swore under oath did not exist.

Yesterday Curtis Hebert, new guy in Vermont (the old guy got sent on vacation after the leak) held a (sorta) press conference before the Senate met. He read a statement and refused to take questions. The statement said lawyers hired by Entergy to conduct an “independent internal investigation” found Entergy officials didn’t lie to regulators about the supposedly nonexistent leaky pipe. (Translation: “We’re not dishonest, we’re incompetent. Can we please keep running a nuke in your state?”)

The snow flew all through the day, heavy flakes that accumulated like wet cement. Town meeting, our annual exercise in direct democracy, is next Tuesday and we always seem to get a blizzard within a week of town meeting.

Inside the statehouse, a holiday atmosphere reigned. Some two hundred supporters of closing Vermont Yankee crowded the halls. Entergy Louisiana had trucked in 50 plant workers the day before, but none we present for the actual debate. Off looking for the leaks, I suppose. A public gallery runs the perimeter of the Senate chamber. Citizens sit so close, they can reach out and tap legislators on the shoulder.

Extra police officers were in the halls to help with crowd control, but environmental organizers kept everyone headed where they needed go. I saw one police officer cooing to a year-old baby who had a “Retire Vermont Yankee as Planned” sticker on her snugli. A delegation of Russian citizens on a cultural exchange passed through the crowd with their interpreter. Their eyes were wide in amazement. Doesn’t look like this back home, does it folks?

The final vote – 26 to 4 – is in keeping with conversations I’ve had with fellow Vermonters in the last few years. Most people know the time for nuclear power is past and look forward to a renewable energy future. A few people disagree, are dug in and put out that they constitute such a small minority. It’s OK, they’ll get over it. We’ll welcome them back. It’s Vermont, after all. We’ll be living together for the rest of our lives.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

This is bad timing for Yankee’s owner, Entergy of Louisiana, because the Vermont legislature is currently considering Entergy’s request to extend the 38-year-old plant’s license to operate for another 20 years. (Vermont is the only state in which the legislature has the power to intervene in a nuclear plant’s license.)

Even Governor Jim Douglas, who has been an unabashed Entergy supporter until now, demanded the firing of Entergy Vice President Jay Thayer. Mr. Thayer swore under oath that Vermont Yankee has no underground pipes. Then it was discovered that the tritium was leaking from – underground pipes. (Still a friend to Entergy, the governor has also called for a “timeout” to allow the corporation to rebuild the people’s shattered trust. After all, you wouldn’t want to decide whether or not to go ahead and get married after you catch your intended in bed with your best friend, you’d want to give it time to rebuild trust.)

It’s unclear at this point who is the dog and who is the pony in this dog-and-pony show, but Entergy did get rid of Mr. Thayer. (Which is not to say he was fired. He was placed on “administrative leave” pending investigation, which means he goes on vacation until this whole thing blows over; when he returns with a tan, he’ll be sent off to tell whoppers about some other Entergy facility.)

The new face of Entergy in Vermont is Curt Hebert, Jr., Entergy’s vice president of external affairs and former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Mr. Hebert is known as a lifelong opponent of government intervention in energy markets. (Then why was he the federal government’s chief energy regulator, you ask? He was appointed by George W. Bush.)

So up here in Vermont, the public, press and politicians are seriously cheesed off at the out-of-state corporation that has mismanaged the state’s only nuke since it bought it in 2002 and has been caught passing misinformation again and again. What’s Entergy’s response? To send a bitter foe of government intervention to the one state where the government has more power to intervene than any other. It makes one wonder if Entergy’s CEO Wayne Leonard might be spending too much time in the radiation room.

Mr. Hebert’s greatest claim to fame is that he presided over the federal government’s deer-in-the-headlights inaction when the 2000-2001 energy crisis caused rolling blackouts in California. (Heckuva job, Curty!)

According to published accounts, Mr. Hebert – acting on Dick Cheney’s orders – covered up the market manipulation by Enron and others that led to the California and instead encouraged California to cancel its environmental regulations. Now his kind ministrations will be visited on Vermont. Oh boy.

To paraphrase Lord Acton, power corrupts and nuclear power corrupts absolutely.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

That’s not true, there’s plenty of mischief still available to the Terrible Twins and as we saw with the wiretapping bill last month, there are more than enough foolish Democrats willing to abet Bush/Cheney shenanigans.

When Congress reconvenes in a few weeks, it will take up consideration of an energy bill and the Cheney cronies will be pushing for the construction of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Expect to hear that we need – desperately need – more nuclear power as a solution to global warming. All the politicians who’ve been doing the bidding of big oil (“Oh no, we can’t tax ExxonMobil’s billions in windfall profits.”) and big auto (“Oh no, we can’t raise fuel-efficiency standards.”) will now stand in the wells of their respective bodies and tell us that unless we allow another wave of nuclear experimentation wash across the nation, your grandma will die of heat stroke.

To the eternal embarrassment of most of my fellow Vermonters, we have a nuclear power plant in the Green Mountain State. Vermont Yankee was built 35 years ago and should be nearing the end of its life. Its license is set to expire in 2012, but the plant’s owner Entergy Nuclear, has applied for a 20-year extension. It may well get the extension, seeing as last year the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowed the plant to increase its power output by 20 percent more than it was designed to produce.

Tuesday, still in the midst of high summer electricity demand, Vermont Yankee had to cut its output by half when its cooling towers began to fail under the pressure of the extra water that’s been forced through them since the power boost.

Okay, okay – Vermont Yankee is an old reactor. The nuclear industry says its new generation of reactors will be “inherently safe.” Maybe – maybe not. The problem with a promise like that is we cannot determine its truth unless we allow the construction of the new reactors and they operate safely for 50 years – or have meltdowns.

Since we can’t predict the future, we have to use the past as a guide. We know when nuclear-generated electricity was first developed, we were told we could have it for nothing, as it would be “too cheap to meter.” It was not, is not and never will be. In fact, when the first nukes were built no insurance company on Earth would write a policy to cover one. To fill the gap, the federal government in 1957 agreed to cover losses from a nuclear mishap for the first ten years until everyone saw how safe nuclear plants were. By 1967, still no insurance company would write a nuke policy, so the federal insurance scheme was extended for another 10 years. After that, the extensions were for 12, 15 and 20 years. Congress keeps making the extensions longer as its way of facing the fact that “the invisible hand of the free market” won’t come within a thousand miles of one of these idiotic machines.

While the US has had nukes for a half-century, we have never agree on a place to put the nuclear waste, which will be hazardous to living things for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve spent $10 billion on a “repository” at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but it’s not clear that it will ever open. Meanwhile, five decades of nuclear waste sits in “temporary” storage on-site at power plants, accidents or terrorist targets waiting to happen.

In recent nuclear news, a French consortium earlier this month won a half-billion euro contract to build a new sarcophagus over the melted reactor at Chernobyl, scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Radiation is leaking out of the site again.

Last month, an earthquake in Japan shut down the world’s largest nuclear power complex which, unknown to authorities (!!!) was built on a major fault line. The earthquake caused a fire at the reactor, tipped over barrels of contaminated material and spilled hundreds of gallons of radioactive water into the ocean.

In France and Alabama reactors have been shut down this summer – again during peak demand – because their water discharges were overheating local rivers. How is that a solution to global warming?

The list of nuclear energy’s deficiencies is almost too long and farcical to be believed and is available to all with the slightest of Googles. A new generation of these disasters should be the easiest of pitfalls for Congress to avoid, but recent history unfortunately suggests that may not be the case.

© Mark Floegel, 2007