By DANIEL BARLOW
Vermont Press Bureau
MONTPELIER – The relicensing of Vermont Yankee appeared in doubt Friday as lawmakers and members of the Douglas administration expressed outrage that officials from the nuclear power plant may have misled regulators.
House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morristown, told reporters at the Statehouse Friday that this week’s revelation that the facility does indeed have underground pipes containing radioactive fluid “threatens the level of trust that Vermonters have in Entergy to provide accurate information about anything.”
“The representations made by Entergy were clearly wrong,” Smith said. “They told us that there was no radioactive material flowing through those pipes … that was untrue.”
Officials from Entergy Nuclear Vermont, the company that owns Vermont Yankee, told state and legislative officials on a number of occasions that those pipes did not carry irradiated water. That includes statements made by Entergy officials under oath to the Vermont Public Service Board.
Controversy over the piping came to light this month when Entergy revealed that the plant was leaking a radioactive isotope called tritium into nearby ground water. The size of the leak is within state safety guidelines, but it is clear that it is likely coming from underground piping
Smith and Senate President Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, a gubernatorial candidate, announced that they were reconvening the Vermont Yankee Public Oversight Panel, a group appointed by the Legislature and Gov. James Douglas last year to oversee a safety audit of the 38-year-old nuclear power plant.
Shumlin, who lives in the same county as Vermont Yankee, said the inaccurate statements made by Entergy to the Oversight Panel, which ruled that the plant could operate for 20 more years with some technical changes, called into question the validity of the whole process.
He said the Oversight Panel would reopen the investigation, examine the new evidence and determine if Entergy misled state officials about any other parts of the audit. The panel is scheduled to report back to lawmakers by Feb. 16.
“This leak has not yet been found,” Shumlin said. “And it’s either in piping that we were told did not exist or it’s in a leaking tank that we were told did not exist.”
Entergy has denied that it deliberately misled state officials and lawmakers, categorizing the controversy as a “miscommunication.” But it comes when the company is doing its best to appear as a solid corporate citizen as lawmakers consider voting this year on allowing the facility to operate for another 20 years after 2012.
This story appeared in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus
