Middlebury College Student Global Affairs Conference: Power and Protest Presentation
/In January, Fairewinds was invited to Middlebury College to discuss the risk and burden of a nuclear powered energy future at the student organized event, Power and Protest. Special thanks to student organizer Mohamed Hussein, Middlebury staff, and fellow presenters for making this event possible!
Transcript
English
I’m the last speaker of a group of auspicious speakers. And it sort of causes you to try to see if there’s a unifying theme here. And maybe it’s because of my life experience, but to me, the unifying theme is that there seems to be a requirement if nuclear is going to really work successfully that there be a dispassionate, neutral regulator, and that basically there needs to be an honest broker in government. I think – I look back at Daniel’s keynote as he was talking about what we might call environmental racism here in the States or environmental justice, and I think of Flint, which is right in front of everybody’s mind right now here in the States. I have a hard time calling it environmental racism in Japan because it is essentially a one-race country, but it certainly is an environmental justice issue that these plants are – maybe not deliberately, but certainly the process drives you to put these into places where people can protest the least. And Jessica’s arguments were really – you brought out the fact that in order for the Mideast to have a chance with a successful nuclear power program, there has to be that dispassionate nuclear regulator. And Richard, I was reminded as you were beginning your speech on nuclear that Mark Antony’s eulogy of Caesar – “I came to bury nuclear power, not to praise it.” We all know how that one turned out. But in fact, at the end of the day, I share with you that this is not the vision for the future.
I think where I might disagree is I don’t believe that we have this fair broker in the United States. There was a comment yesterday about the Japanese program and how the Japanese regulators were in bed with the people at Tokyo Electric. I’d submit that that same thing happens here but that the luck of the draw caused the disaster to happen in Fukushima and not in Diablo Canyon or Indian Point or someplace else. And then, of course, this afternoon’s presentation really talks about the fact that government did have a finger on the scale to change the balance of the equation in Japan. And I think my presentation will follow along those lines. I think because of my particular ground. And I really didn’t plan on getting into this until I tried to make some sense out of this.
I’ve been at it for 45 years. I was the senior vice president for a nuclear licensee, and in 1990, I found some safety violations in our company – not a nuclear power plant – we disassembled nuclear facilities – and were required to have an NRC license – Nuclear Regulatory Commission license – and as a result of finding those things, the president of the company fired me. And I went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, fully expecting to be exonerated. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission blew me away. So then I went to John Glenn, who was the senator and head of the oversight committee that handles nuclear power. And he fired up the inspector general, and two inspector general reports later and a congressional hearing showed that all of the violations that I had discovered were true, and that NRC inspectors were in fact taking bribes.
So you would think that that’s a fundamental change in my world view, and it was. Except that I still believed in nuclear power. This was between ’90 and ’96. So in that process, we lost our house, we went bankrupt, I was sued for a million and a half dollars, we were driven into bankruptcy. But even through all that, I kept telling myself that if nuclear was properly regulated, it would be a good technology. And in 2009, I signed a report commissioned by the State of Vermont that Vermont Yankee should continue to run for another 20 years. But Daiichi changed my mind; that nuclear is not going to be the bridge technology.
And I think this is where maybe Richard and I would disagree; that I think nuclear is never going to have a fair regulator. And it was Fukushima Daiichi that pushed me over the line. So I consider myself a nuclear critic based on the data – I’ve come to that conclusion as opposed to a nuclear activist. So I planned, instead of looking at hundreds of issues an inch deep, I wanted to look at one issue maybe a mile deep. And that’s Vermont Yankee, as it stands now, being dismantled. And there is a play being played out between the State of Vermont, myself and several other states about the dismantlement process that I think is illustrative of the role that the nuclear regulator plays in the process. So before I change the first slide, if you’re taking notes, it’s Gundersen – s-e-n. And it’s Fairewinds with an “e” in the middle of it.
Nuclear power has always been heavily subsidized. This is a chart from the Department of Energy and it goes back 60 years. And over the 60 years – if anybody would like the presentation, let me know and I can send it to you – it goes back 60 years and over 60 years, nuclear has received about – almost half, just a hair under half – of subsidies. This is for new nuclear power designs. Coal and oil are another quarter and then renewables are about 12 percent. So renewables have gotten about one quarter of what nuclear has received in subsidies. These are direct subsidies on how to produce a solar panel versus how to build a small modular reactor or a traveling wave reactor or a pivotal (?7:49) bed reactor or whatever. So these are direct technology transfers – funds for that.
Now in addition to those subsidies, we have other subsidies. And one is right in your homeowners policy. If you look in your homeowners policy, if you look at that red arrow on the very bottom, it says that nuclear hazards are not paid for by your insurance company. Back in the 50’s, nuclear power plants were brand new and there wasn’t an actuarial basis to insure nuclear power plants. So the nuclear industry went to congress and they said can you give us a break and basically subsidize our insurance policies for five years. And it was called the Price Anderson policy. And congress said sure. And maybe those first five years it made sense. But every five years after that, it has now been extended. So what that means is that if there’s a serious nuclear disaster, like a Fukushima level disaster, it’s the taxpayers and not the owner of the power plant that’s on the line for the initial funds. Unlike in Japan. For instance, in Japan, Tokyo Electric was basically driven into bankruptcy. They did not declare bankruptcy but they are essentially a bankrupt organization.
And in the United States, we’ve set up limited liability corporations where, let’s say Vermont Yankee were to have a disaster back when it was operating last year, Entergy, the owner, is completely protected from any of the liabilities from that accident because it’s a limited liability corporation. And they fall behind this issue of Price Anderson insurance for protection of the public. I’ll get into – keep that in mind – I’ll get into that at the end of the presentation as well.
So those are what I would call direct subsidies. We’ve got our finger on the scale – the government has its finger on the scale pushing nuclear over other alternatives. This is also many others – the gas industry has privileges on piping, etc. In the 80’s, many nuclear power plants were so expensive that they wrote down the cost of the plants and the ratepayers wound up carrying an inordinate amount of that write down instead of the stockholders. So there’s been numerous subsidies.
But what I want to talk about is how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is effectively subsidizing nuclear power through the decommissioning process with legal exemptions. There’s no money being transferred here, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is using the law to give a huge financial incentive to nuclear power. Well, what is decommissioning? Decommissioning is basically just like a plant that’s got asbestos or another hazardous chemical. It’s a process of controlled demolition to make sure that the workers and the public don’t receive excess exposure, whether it was exposure to asbestos or exposure to radiation.
Now this is not a controlled demolition, as you can see. This is the cooling tower at Trojan and it was clean, so you didn’t have to protect the workers from radiation and there was none to worry about. But it’s the dismantlement of a facility that’s contaminated in such a way that the public is protected from the contamination and the workers are protected.
The Nuclear Regulatory commission has a term that they spell S-A-F-S-T-O-R. They pronounce it safe store, and I submit to you that your third grade teacher would fail you on that test if you pronounced it that way. There’s no e in it – it’s real saf stor. But it’s meant to mean that the decommissioning process is safe storage for an extended amount of time. And just how long is that extended amount of time? Sixty years. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it’s okay to let the carcass of a power plant sit on the side of the Connecticut River or wherever for as long as 60 years until you dismantle it.
Now there’s no bases in physics for that 60 years. That 60-year number is completely arbitrary. It’s not like most of the isotopes completely decay away at that point and it’s safe. It has no bases in physics. So the real answer is it has a huge basis in money. So let’s follow the money for just a minute here. The former Commissioner or Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a guy named Greg Jaczko – he was the commissioner two commissioners ago. And this is his quote of just two months ago. “From a technical perspective and a safety perspective, there’s really no rationale for a 60-year waste disposal.” When you push people on these factors, they come back with, we can’t decommission sooner because we don’t have the money.
So this 60-year window is established not because it protects the workers, not because it protects the public, but because the owner of the utility doesn’t have to have all the money in the bank ahead of time.
Now in Vermont, we require that a windmill have all the money in the bank before it’s allowed to start. So we really have a double standard here. In Vermont, we require that the owner of a windmill have enough money in the bank in bond or something like that to dismantle that windmill when it breaks or is no longer economically competitive. We don’t let it sit on the ridgeline for 60 years. But Vermont doesn’t control nuclear power because that falls under a limitation that the Atomic Energy Commission started and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues, that says that the regulation of nuclear is a federal issue.
So the feds say you’ve got 60 years to dismantle that power plant and here in Vermont we say you’ve got maybe a year to knock down your windmill. So what does that mean? And the first thing it means is that when a power plant is in the process of considering shutting down, the first thing the owner of the power plant does is go to the town and try to get the town to apply pressure to regulators to get it some sort of an additional financial break. They basically hold the town hostage. And they’ll say look, we’re out of here and you’re going to have this plant and essentially no people, maybe a couple guards, for 60 years. And then we’ll come back and the labor force will increase. But for 60 years, you’re going to suffer a huge dent in your employment. Well, if that money were available – required to be available when the plant is shut down, the town could have an orderly transition over 10 years. They could say okay, 10 years from now this carcass is going to be gone; but in the meantime, we’re going to have thousands of – or certainly hundreds, many hundreds of paid employees in town dismantling the facility. So it makes for a more orderly transition in the town as opposed to the town seeing basically a step decrease in revenues.
So the first issue is that by allowing a plant to be decommissioned without the money available to do the job is that the town is held hostage. The second issue is that prime real estate is allowed to lie fallow for 60 years. This is Vermont Yankee. Just south of the plant is a hydroelectric dam. So there’s ample electricity. To the left of the picture is a railroad. Of course, to the right of the picture is a huge source of water. That’s a facility that could have another either industrial or private use. But with decommissioning delayed for 60 years, that land lies fallow and is unusable by society.
So for those two reasons, the concept of allowing the money to build up in the bank so that 60 years out you’ve got enough to dismantle the plant, I believe are wrong. And effectively it’s a huge subsidy to the nuclear industry. Because what it means is that over the life of the plant, they don’t have to accrue as much money as they would. So they can make more per kilowatt sold, perhaps as much as $20 million a year per kilowatt sold, because they have offset these charges and are counting on a much smaller fund and the stock market to build it up.
So that’s one issue within Nuclear Regulatory control that Fairewinds is fighting, the State of Vermont is fighting. Chris Recchia at the Department of Public Service has really taken on the charge and actually is litigating against the NRC. Since then, there’s been three amicus briefs filed, one by Connecticut, one by Massachusetts and one by New York supporting the state on the issue of dismantlement of Vermont Yankee.
Now this is really important, not just for Vermont. And I don’t think if it were just for Vermont, I would have talked to you about it today. Vermont is the first plant in this wave. We’re the bow wave of nuclear dismantlements. There’s 100 nuclear plants, 5 broke in the last couple of years and will never be started up again; 2 shut down for financial reasons. Vermont Yankee shut down, not because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was safe and not because they got tired of hearing the activists screaming at the gate; but they shut down because it was too expensive to operate. And another one. And there’s about 3 more that have already committed to closing in the next year or two.
So we are the front of a wave of as many as 100 plants that over the next 20 roughly years will have to be dismantled. So this is Vermont’s battle now, but it’s really the nation’s battle. And it’s kind of heartening to see 3 other states line up with amicus briefs to support the state.
So the second issue in the Vermont argument is the issue of exemptions. An exemption is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you wanted to drive to Dartmouth and God knows why somebody from Middlebury would want to drive to Dartmouth, but if you – in order to get there on time, you’ve got to go 95 miles an hour. So you pull into the State Police barracks and you ask permission to break the law. And they say sure, you can break the law. That’s what’s happening in nuclear regulation. Exemptions are being granted allowing the owners of these plants to break the law as written. And that’s what Chris Recchia and the Department of Public Service are arguing about extensively. And it’s not just the Department of Public Service. The entire congressional delegation – Leahy, Sanders – you may have heard of him – and Welch, have all written to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking them to stop the exemptions.
And just this week, the Chairman – a guy named Burns – from the NRC wrote back and said no, we think exemptions are a good idea and we’re going to continue to do it. In the meantime, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the process of changing its regulations so there won’t be exemptions any more. They’re in the process of changing the law to basically those clauses that were causing problems are being eliminated.
So Recchia and our congressional delegation is saying hey, what’s going on here. So this is an important picture for all of the 100 plants in the United States, and the ones that come after that. If the decommissioning trust fund is required to be fully funded, then that will raise the cost of nuclear and it’s already cost prohibitive. So I submit that we’ve got a regulator whose best interests are in perpetuating nuclear. And this is just one example. I could speak for hours on other examples. But I chose to drill down in the decommissioning.
So what’s at the base of this exemption thing? This is a picture of Yucca Mountain. And Yucca Mountain is in Nevada. And as we learned from Daniel yesterday, it was chosen by a Republican congress and put in a democratic state. There is no scientific basis for Yucca Mountain, but the bill that put Yucca Mountain – that put waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in the 80’s was affectionately called the “Screw Nevada Bill.” So Nevada got this and it was never scientifically correct, but it was certainly politically correct. Now, Nevada’s senior senator is a democrat and was actually head of the Senate – a guy named Harry Reid. And Harry has basically stopped Yucca Mountain. But the people in Nevada don’t want it, either. So he’s really representing the people of Nevada, in that Yucca Mountain is not happening under the Obama administration; and of course we’ll see what happens if it gets turned around. But for 8 years, Yucca Mountain has been stopped dead in its tracks.
Now what that means is that utilities have been paying money into a trust fund administered by the Department of Energy for 30 years or so. And the deal was that when the nuclear fuel was done, they were going to ship it to Yucca Mountain. There was a contract, a real contract between the Department of Energy and the utilities that allowed for this to happen. We give you money, you promise you’re going to get rid of our fuel.
When DOE broke its side of the bargain, Yucca Mountain’s not ready. Utilities and the owners of nuclear power, through a limited liability corporation, really non-utility – they sued Department of Energy and every single one of them has won to get to the money for the waste storage paid for out of the Department of Energy funds. So there’s a process. You hire a law firm, they sue the Department of Energy. They litigate for a couple of years and the Department of Energy gives you the money to take this waste and store it at your site as opposed to store it at their site. That’s around $400 million. So it’s a lot of money. But it’s money the owner of the utility puts out but gets back after litigation.
Well, that’s not adequate for the owners of nuclear power. And what they’re relying on is something called OPM – other people’s money. What they would rather do is tap the decommissioning fund for that money interest free so that it doesn’t tie up any of their working capital. There’s nothing in the decommissioning law that allows that. And this is, again, where Chris Recchia is really, really arguing a great point, that the law as written doesn’t allow those funds to be used for storage of spent fuel. It’s a decommissioning trust fund. It’s our money to decommission that carcass. It’s not the utility’s money to borrow interest free for 5 or 6 years until they’ve taken that fuel, stored it and then litigate it.
So what the owners of the utilities have effectively done is taken interest-free money from a trust fund as opposed to going out in the market and having that capital tied up. And it would ruin their return on investment. Their return on investments would drop because they’ve taken their money; now they’re taking ours. It’s not in the law and Recchia and the State of Vermont are pushing that argument.
What does that mean? It has a huge safety ramification. Here’s a picture of a nuclear fuel rod. I think we talked yesterday – this is called cherintoff (?25:38) radiation – being placed into a nuclear fuel rack. And in a nuclear power plant, there can be as much as 35 years worth of nuclear fuel stored in the racks now. When the plants were made, when I went to college and graduated way back in the 70’s, the plan was that the fuel pools for 5 years and then it was out. And I actually ran the division that built fuel pool racks. And we would – I can still remember, people would say we’re running up against our 5-year limit, we probably should double it to 10, so we’d sell racks. And then 5 years later, they’d say oh, my God, we ran out of fuel racks; maybe we’d better double it again. And we’d get 20. We actually sold racks and then re-racks to the same utilities because they kept putting more and more fuel into these fuel pools.
Now a fuel pool is an active device. It’s got pumps, it’s got valves, it’s got pipes. This is Fukushima Daiichi’s unit 4 after the tsunami. The cooling systems failed. And that’s the fuel pool boiling. And it almost boiled dry. Over on the left you can see little boxes, and that’s the fuel as the wind blows a fog off the surface. And they’re very close to being exposed directly to air. So storing in the spent fuel pool relies on active sources. And it’s also a huge terrorist target. That was mentioned yesterday.
The alternative is to store it in dry casks. These are dry casks at Connecticut Yankee. And this is about 40 years worth of nuclear fuel. It’s passive. These casks are designed to air cool the fuel. Well, all it has to do is sit there. There’s holes on the bottom to allow the air in and there’s holes on the top to allow the air out, and there’s a double barrier in between so that only the heat gets out and the radiation stays in. Now Fukushima Daiichi had casks. They withstood the tsunami and the earthquake just fine. It was the racks that failed. And it was the racks that called Chairman Jaczko at the time to tell Americans to get away – get out at least 50 miles because here they were afraid of a fuel pool failure.
So the concept of storing all of this material into a fuel pool was never planned when these plants were built, but has happened over time, even though there’s an alternative. And it’s the NRC that’s allowing this to happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says well, it’s nice we really need to protect the workers and not move that fuel. And really, though, if you look at the history in the nuclear industry, when a plant is broken, very rapidly it’s fixed under extraordinarily high exposures. They don’t have the owner of the utility say we should wait for 2 or 3 months and let the radiation exposures calm down before we move people in. We’ll do it right now because time is money.
An example is there was one power plant where, in order to save time, as the plant was cooling down, the employees were walking on the nuclear reactor. And it was still so hot that their rubber booties were sticking to the steel. So the utility owners have pushed these plants to the point where outages are extraordinarily fast. And as I say here, dose be damned. To go up on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission site, they’ll tell you that the reason we’re given 60 years is to protect the poor workers. But in fact, when it means a lost day of production, those exposure limits are just thrown out the window.
In a nuclear fuel pool like Vermont Yankee right now, there’s the equivalent amount of cesium as in 700 bombs. So you can see that having an active system is extraordinarily dangerous. This is the same fuel pool that we saw boiling before at Fukushima Daiichi. Vermont Yankee and Daiichi have the same pool. So we are storing the equivalent cesium content of 700 nuclear bombs in those fuel pools. And I submit it’s a lot safer to get them out of the fuel pool as quickly as possible and put a minimal amount in the pool. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s exemption policy is making the fuel pools less safe. And here’s why.
Utilities know that if they wait until a power plant is decommissioned, they can get an exemption and get that money from the fund – from our trust fund – and not from their having to go to the market and borrow that money. So it improves their ROI – return on investment – to wait until the plant is officially dismantled before these things are put into dry cask storage.
Now it could easily be that every 4 or 5 years you took a bunch of fuel out and you put it in dry cask storage. But if they did that while the plant is still operating, that money would come out of their operating funds and they would have to litigate for 6 or 7 years against the Department of Energy until they got it back. So it improves their return on investment by waiting until the 40th year or beyond in order to remove the fuel from the fuel pool.
So I submit to you that the exemption actually makes nuclear power less safe; that it’s in the public’s best interests to get as much of that fuel out of the pool as quickly as possible. You can’t get it all. There’s about 5 years worth that’s too radioactive to be put in those casks.
So what could possibly go wrong with all this nuclear fuel in a fuel pool? And there’s 3 examples of waiting 60 years or storing in a fuel pool that are illustrative. The first is emergency planning. The NRC has allowed Entergy to eliminate emergency planning at Vermont Yankee now that the plant is shut down, despite the fact that we’ve got active systems in that fuel pool that have to be operating in order to prevent the pool from overheating. So by collapsing the fuel pool in – by collapsing the emergency plan in – the NRC is saying that our calculations show that no radiation, if there was a radiation release – no radiation is going to leave the site boundary.
Well, now, let’s go back to Price Anderson. Price Anderson is meant to protect the public if radiation does leave the site boundary. So that would mean logically that the utility should renounce its Price Anderson insurance. If it’s that sure that it can eliminate emergency planning because radiation doesn’t leave the site boundary, then it should also be, then, willing to renounce its insurance. But the insurers won’t allow that to happen.
So in my opinion, until that fuel is safely on the ground in those dry cask storage units, the evacuation plans should be kept in place. There’s two examples. This thing here is a cask that goes inside a dry cask. So this is a steel cask that would get lifted and then put into a concrete cask. And that was what we showed in the previous picture. Well, right up at the top – I guess I should use the pointer – right up at the top here is a heavy lift. This canister weighs on the order of 110 tons. So it’s the equivalent of roughly 50 cars. So it’s 110 tons. Right up here is a motor with brakes. At Vermont Yankee, when they were moving one of these, the brakes failed. So we have an incident where the brakes failed on that canister and it began to move downward in an uncontrolled manner. Luckily, it was moving relatively slowly, but they couldn’t stop it until it landed on the floor. Now if the brakes totally failed, it would punch a hole in the floor. This is a very heavy object.
So we already have a precedent that when moving spent fuel, the brakes can fail on that very heavy canister. For that reason alone, for that precedent alone, we should continue to have the emergency plan in play. Now the other thing is, at Vermont Yankee – this is specific here – at Vermont Yankee, there’s a grammar school 4,000 feet across the street, yet the fuel is allowed to be moved when that grammar school is in session. Now that’s a specific Vermont issue. But all the other things I’ve been talking about here are national issues. We know that canisters have lost their brakes, and until we’ve got it all on the ground safely stored, I believe we should have an emergency plan. But it costs money.
The second example – this is an ancient power plant – this is Dresden 1 – it’s right outside of Chicago. And it was shut down in 1990 and put in Safstor. What happened is, they turned the heat off in the building and a pipe froze and drained the fuel pool. So in 1993, the fuel pools lost like 70,000 gallons of water. Had it gone one more day, it would have been completely dry and it would have caused the evacuation of the entire site, because this fuel is so radioactive. So this was a near-miss precursor accident. And really how can you call something “safe store” when you’ve had an incident where a pool began to run dry because of a broken pipe and went unnoticed for several days?
The last one is bunny money. At the Hanford site, there’s a couple nuclear reactors. And they are in this 60-year Safstor. And what’s happened is rodents have gotten in and are eating the wires and coming out. And the droppings are radioactive. They can pick them up in a helicopter. So they fly over the site, they find the radioactive rabbit droppings and then they send guys out with guns to kill the rabbits. They get $75 an hour to do this. The guys call it bunny money. They really like their Saturdays. They go out and hunt rabbits for 75 bucks an hour. But rodents do invest a carcass when it’s sitting for 60 years. Wasps also. There’s radioactive wasp nests outside of the Hanford site because the bugs go in to remove whatever from inside the plant and then build their hives outside – radioactive birds nests as well.
So it behooves everyone to dismantle this thing relatively quickly. And the way the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is presently structuring its laws, that is being almost prohibited. It’s not in the interests of the owner of the plant to dismantle the plant quickly.
So the bottom line is, this is just one example of how a regulator can evaluate history in such a manner that there’s no – there appears to be no public health effect, when in fact, history shows that there’s a huge historical basis to assume that something bad can happen. Fairewinds wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission back in March of last year with this and more information in the public process to comment on the Vermont Yankee decommissioning. And it’s now 11 months and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t responded yet. So the public participation process, I submit to you, is a sham.
The real question is, do we have a trust fund? Or do we have a slush fund? And the way it was planned to be established was that it was a trust. It was our money that we had set aside. And the goal was to dismantle that facility; not to enrich the owner of that utility, of that plant after it had been operated.
Three other items real quick. Here in Vermont bright people understood that limited liability corporations are not in the bests interests of Vermonters when it comes to a nuclear power plant. Vermont’s Peter Bradford, who’s down here in Peru, was a former commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and wrote eloquently in 2000 – 15 years ago – that having a utility sell its power plant to a limited liability corporation is not in the best interests of the State of Vermont or other states. There’s 40 others outside of Vermont. Which is the last piece of Recchia’s argument.
Now when Vermont Yankee became a limited liability corporation, we lost the ability to audit the books. When it was a public utility, it was ours. Our public utility commission had the right to go in and determine an adequate rate of return, even when the plant wasn’t running. But now that it’s a merchant plant, now that it sells its power directly out onto the grid without any ratepayer oversight, we’ve lost the ability to determine how the money in the fund is being spent.
And the last piece relating to that is, within nuclear regulation, there’s a one-paragraph formula that allows utilities to roughly calculate how much money they need to set aside so that 60 years out, they’ll have enough to decommission the plant. Now this formula was made in the 70’s before Excel spreadsheets. And now if you have an Excel spreadsheet, it’s very simple to lay this formula out and show regulators exactly how much you need and be able to change the interest rate, change this assumption, change that assumption. But the Nuclear Regulatory commission will not change that formula.
If you recall as Vermonters – perhaps you do – we had the legislature pulling out their hair about how much money is in the fund and how is it going to be spent. Well, we did a spreadsheet and in fact, if we didn’t have the spent fuel liability – if the spent fuel liability was covered by Department of Energy, the carcass of Vermont Yankee could be eliminated by 2031. Now Entergy is saying it’s going to be eliminated by 2056. So that’s 25 additional years of a radioactive carcass and a piece of land that lies fallow that could be put to a productive use a lot sooner.
So I submit to you that this is just one example within nuclear law of how the scales are tipped, not to our advantage – we don’t even have a level playing field here – that the incentives are for the owners to maximize their profits. We basically socialize the risk. Price Anderson is socialized risk. And we’ve privatized the profit. Thank you.
