Employees of Vt. Yankee urge support for plant
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By DANIEL BARLOW Vermont Press Bureau - Published: May 5, 2009
MONTPELIER – More than 200 people employed by the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant toured the Statehouse on Monday, urging lawmakers not to approve a bill they believe will force the Vernon facility to shut down.
The workers, many of them wearing stickers saying, "I support VY," included corporate Entergy Vermont Nuclear employees all the way down to local union carpenters who contract with the company for jobs several times a year.
Workers said they worried that a bill requiring Entergy to put hundreds of millions of dollars into its decommissioning fund would force the company to close the facility, leaving about 600 people unemployed.
"I think a lot of people see the corporation behind Vermont Yankee and forget about the workers there," said David Borrus, the council representative to the Pile Drivers Local Union #56. "Vermont Yankee is not just a corporation. There are hundreds of people there with good-paying jobs who care about the community they live in."
Anti-Vermont Yankee protests are common in Montpelier, where several organizations are located that are opposed to the facility's bid to extend its operating license another 20 years beyond 2012.
Aside from a high-powered lobbying team hired by Entergy, citizen support for Vermont Yankee at the Statehouse is rarely seen. Several workers said they were glad to take a day off to travel to Montpelier, where many of them toured the Statehouse and met key lawmakers for the first time.
"We hear a lot about the anti-nuclear groups and what they're doing up here," said Lily Thompson, a union carpenter from western Massachusetts. "But I don't think legislators too often hear from the people who actually work there."
This citizen lobbying effort, organized in part by the Vermont Energy Partnership, a coalition of business groups, including Entergy, comes a tad late this year: Both the House and the Senate have already passed different versions of the decommissioning bill.
The House bill requires Entergy to fill up the decommissioning fund over a period of 10 years if the facility is not relicensed to operate past 2012 or if Entergy sells it to a spin-off company, as it proposed to do last year. The Senate bill would only require the company to fill up the fund if it sells to a spin-off company.
Entergy's decommissioning fund has lost about 20 percent of its value in the last year as Wall Street sank. The fund, which Entergy has not put any money into since buying the facility in 2002, is hundreds of millions of dollars short of the estimated $900 million or more needed to shut down and clean up the site.
Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, the chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said lawmakers plan to meet Tuesday to discuss compromises between the two versions of the bill.
Tony Graziano, a union carpenter from Boston who does work at the nuclear facility, said he worried that passing the bill would force Vermont Yankee to shut down in 2012 – or maybe even earlier. He said it would be a step backward for Vermont.
"At a time when we want to depend less on foreign oil, Vermont Yankee makes sense," he said. "This is clean, cost-effective energy that provides well-paying jobs for the state."
Entergy officials have not explicitly said that forced payments to their decommissioning fund would force the company to shut down the facility early, although it has been implied. Corporate officials have also threatened to sue the state if the House version of the bill passes.
It's also not clear what Gov. James Douglas will do with the bill if it reaches his desk. He vetoed a bill very similar to the Senate version that lawmakers passed in the 2008 legislative session. Lawmakers did not have the votes to override him.
Bob Stannard, a lobbyist for the Citizens Action Network, an organization opposed to relicensing Vermont Yankee, said Monday that he certainly understands workers' fears over the future of their jobs at the plant.
But 2012 has always been the date that Vermont Yankee would close, he said, and workers there have three more years to find new jobs or be retrained. He said Vermonters across the state don't want to see the plant mothballed for 60 years while the decommissioning fund builds itself back up after its financial beating on Wall Street recently.
"Even if that plant shuts down today, it would take at least 10 years to decommission it," Stannard said. "A lot of the people there would still have jobs while that is happening."
Contact Daniel Barlow at Daniel.Barlow@timesargus.com.
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