In the end, it wasn’t the attorney general’s federal lawsuit, the Vermont Legislature, the Public Service Board or any of those pesky enviros nitpicking about underground tritium leaks and collapsed cooling towers that shut down Vermont Yankee.
It was the invisible hand of the marketplace.
On Tuesday, New Orleans-based Entergy Corporation announced plans to close the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon by the end of 2014. Praising Vermont Yankee’s talented, committed and dedicated workforce, Entergy chairman and CEO Leo Denault called it “an agonizing decision and an extremely tough call for us.”
Denault touched on some of the economic forces that compelled Entergy’s decision, including a “transformational shift” in the natural gas market that has driven down electricity-generation costs, high maintainence costs on the 41-year-old trouble-prone plant and “wholesale market design flaws” that have kept energy prices “artificially low” throughout New England.
So what happens next? Presumably, the plant spends the next decade or more decommissioning the plant and cleaning up the radiation. According to Entergy’s press release, the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust has a balance of $582 million, in excess of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s minimum financial assurance of $566 million for terminating the plant’s license.
But one nuclear-engineer-turned-industry-watchdog isn’t comforted by that figure. Burlington-based Arnie Gundersen was the first to raise a hue and cry in 2007 about projected shortfalls in the VY decommissioning fund.
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The TRUE cost of nuclear power is coming out for all to see – not so cheap as many of you have been claiming. In fact, as has been proven, nuclear power can become so expensive as to lay waste to thousands of square miles and kill and maim millions of people. But of course at least we get cheap power for microwaves and hair driers for awhile before we have to pay the full cost down the road.
Well at least after the initial onslaught of testimony from Gunderson the end of VY marks the end of his relevance… I guess there is a bright side to everything
Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead!
-Recession in Munchkinland, page B3.
When are you going to stop giving Gunderson inkspace? They guy has made a career out of predicting the routine or obvious.
Natural gas is not natural, non polluting or cheap. Entergy was lawyered to death. Meanwhile, Gaz Metro seems to have acquired our power/ energy supply with blessings.