Blowing the whistle on Vermont Yankee

By Terri Hallenbeck, Free Press Staff Writer

MONTPELIER — Arnie and Maggie Gundersen came to the Statehouse last week hauling a poster-sized map that detailed the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and the monitoring wells that dot the grounds.

Sitting before a legislative committee, Arnie Gundersen recounted the tritium levels found in each well and their proximity to the Connecticut River and to the plant’s functions. 

A committee of legislators listened intently, thirsting for information as the search for a tritium leak at the Vernon plant headed into its second month. Later in the day, the Gundersens would pore over this information with another committee down the hall.

Previous coverage: Find more Vermont Yankee stories

Raw Video: Experts testify on Vermont Yankee in Montpelier

Raw Video: Arnie Gundersen calls for Vermont Yankee to shut down

Lawmakers have come to depend on the Gundersens to help guide them through the minefield of information as they consider the 38-year-old plant’s future after 2012, its proposed corporate restructuring, its eventual decommissioning, and more recently, the tritium leaking from its underground pipes. 

After all, it is Arnie Gundersen who months ago pointed out that the plant appeared to have underground pipes carrying radioactive material, though company representatives had told state officials it did not. 

It is Arnie Gundersen who sounded an alarm about the plant’s cooling towers not long before they crumbled in 2007. 

It is Arnie Gundersen who raised the issue in 2007 that Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning fund would fall short of the amount needed to eventually shut the plant down, a claim the company denied at the time but later conceded would need time to accumulate interest. 

“Arnie Gundersen is the only person who’s been right about Vermont Yankee every time,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, who two years ago appointed Gundersen to an oversight panel to study Vermont Yankee in preparation for decisions about the plant’s continued operation. Since then, the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office has contracted the Gundersens as consultants on Vermont Yankee for up to $47,000. 

Although the Legislature — and by extension the public — has come to rely on Arnie Gundersen to help them understand what’s going on inside the Vernon nuclear power plant, Public Service Commissioner David O’Brien bristles at the very mention of Gundersen’s name. O’Brien contends Gundersen’s warnings have not been as on the mark as some would suggest, is eager for attention and barrages officials with accusatory questions. 

“We’ve always responded to Arnie in a timely manner. That’s always been met with accusations,” O’Brien said. “He seems to be always in an accusatory mode, accusing us of not being forthcoming. That makes it very hard to operate.” 

How did this 61-year-old former nuclear engineer who left the industry years ago and relocated to Burlington for a career of teaching math and science become such a central figure in the evolving saga of Vermont Yankee?

Insider to whistleblower

Gundersen was a senior vice president for Nuclear Energy Services in Connecticut when he found inappropriately stored radioactive material in 1990 and spoke up about it. He quickly found he had crossed the line from nuclear industry executive to whistleblower. He was the subject of a 1995 New York Times article on whistleblowers, which detailed a long road of contentious court battles. 

Maggie Gundersen described her husband as an Eagle Scout and honor student who was hardly a rabble-rouser before that. Arnie Gundersen said the events in Connecticut changed his view of the nuclear industry. 

“Having this experience of blowing the whistle and having the federal government fail makes you think outside the box,” he said. “I thought the system worked. I thought the NRC was enforcing its laws. I found just the opposite.” 

These days, Gundersen finds himself on the other side of the fence, often hired as an expert by anti-nuclear groups such as the New England Coalition. He said, however, he is not opposed to nuclear power. 

He described his stance on nuclear power this way: The nation should not build any more oil or coal plants, but instead should focus on conservation and efficiency. If more power is needed beyond that, nuclear is a better option to him than oil or coal, but he contends several older nuclear power plants, including Vermont Yankee, should be shut down. 

Since leaving the nuclear industry, Gundersen periodically has worked as an expert witness in the field, but he also had to reinvent a career. The Gundersens moved to Burlington in 2001. He taught math and physics at Burlington High School until 2008 and now teaches at the Community College of Vermont. 

Wife Maggie, a former journalist who met her future husband in 1977 when both worked for a proposed nuclear power plant that was never built on the shores of Lake Ontario, became a paralegal after they moved to Burlington. Together, they run a consulting company, Fairewinds Associates, that has come to specialize in doing legal work for those trying to intervene in nuclear issues across the country. 

In their New North End home, the couple sit with laptops, sorting through an avalanche of information they have collected about Vermont Yankee. Between the two of them, they meticulously document everything. Within seconds they can retrieve information about who said what to whom, when. They helpfully finish each other’s sentences. He is the scientist with a steal-trap memory for dates and details. She is the paralegal who digs for documents, compiles reports and prepares testimony. 

Although she once did public relations for a proposed nuclear power plant, Maggie Gundersen said she has come to oppose nuclear power through her paralegal work. Their work on a case in Florida on behalf of cancer victims led her to conclude the system doesn’t work.

Setting sights on Vermont Yankee

It wasn’t until 2003, after Entergy Corp. had bought Vermont Yankee and applied to increase the plant’s output by 20 percent that Gundersen turned his attention to the only nuclear power plant in his new home state. He started doing consulting work for New England Coalition. 

Gundersen raised concerns in 2004 that fans needed for the uprate would compromise the plant’s cooling towers. In 2007, the towers partially crumbled, an event caught in photos that gave opponents of the plant ammunition to ramp up their argument against the 2012 relicensing of Vermont Yankee. 

O’Brien, who as Public Service commissioner oversees the state’s energy interests, said Gundersen unfairly takes credit for the cooling tower prediction. “Arnie has in some ways been more lucky than right,” he said. “His argument was that the weight of the cooling fans was going to cause structural problems. That’s not why the cooling towers failed.” 

The towers collapsed because of rotting wood. Gundersen argues that if authorities had demanded an engineer’s inspection and improved maintenance as he suggested, this could have been prevented. He takes issue with O’Brien’s contention that his predictions aren’t on the mark. 

“It does upset me when people say he didn’t predict the exact way. Well, they didn’t predict it at all,” Gundersen said. 

Likewise, Gundersen predicted in 2006 that steam dryers in the plant could crack because of their age. As if on cue, the plant revealed several cracks in the steam dryers. “They’re reaction was, ‘Of course you’re going to have new cracks,’” Gundersen said. “I said, ‘Why not bring it up ahead of time?’” 

Last July, months before most Vermonters had heard the word tritium, Gundersen was poring over a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report when a mention of underground pipes at Vermont Yankee caught his attention. 

The existence of underground pipes ran counter to everything Vermont Yankee officials had told the oversight panel on which Gundersen served, counter to what the panel had included in its report, counter to what the company had told the Public Service Board in May and counter to what state nuclear engineer Uldis Vanags in June had told the Public Service Board had been his understanding. 

After seeing the NRC report, Gundersen e-mailed O’Brien, who referred him to Vermont Yankee officials. Officials there first asked Gundersen to clarify his question, then responded, “We have none,” and “we consider this issue closed.” 

Gundersen told the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee in October the information about the piping was incorrect. Shumlin indicated the Legislature would deal with the matter when it reconvened in January. 

The first week of January, Vermont Yankee reported it had detected elevated levels of tritium in a monitoring well on the plant’s grounds, which had likely leaked from an underground pipe. 

O’Brien said he gives “kudos” to Gundersen for his persistence in asking about the pipes, but bristled at the suggestion that his department should have been equally as persistent. Asked about the matter in a legislative committee recently, O’Brien said, “I’ll just say this: I am absolutely confident of what the department has done in this instance and how we handled the situation and tried to follow through,” O’Brien said. “You know, if at the end of the day people won’t give you the right answer, there’s limits as to what our ability is to ascertain.” 

Maggie Gundersen said, “If the tritium hadn’t leaked, people would still be saying we’re out on the edge, Arnie’s just being difficult.”

Placing skepticism

When Shumlin appointed Gundersen to the oversight panel in 2008, he was criticized for choosing someone many people considered anti-nuke and certainly anti-Vermont Yankee. Rep. Joseph Krawczyk, R-Bennington, was among them, writing an opinion piece at the time lambasting the appointment. 

A few months later, after the panel issued its report, Krawczyk was impressed with the results and apologized. He has come to listen to Gundersen with new respect. “Do I believe Arnie 100 percent of the time? I don’t believe anybody 100 percent of the time,” he said. “I will listen to everything Mr. Gundersen presents, but I will verify to the best of my ability the facts.” 

When Gundersen recently described the tritium leak at Vermont Yankee as a football field and a half in size, Krawczyk noted to himself that’s simply an estimation. When Gundersen spoke of tritium in the Connecticut River as a certainty, Krawczyk noted that it’s presumed to be in the river but that tests haven’t verified it as certain. 

Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee Chairwoman Virginia Lyons, D-Chittenden, is among those who has come to rely on Gundersen, among other sources, to guide her through the minefield of issues Vermont Yankee presents. She said she has found NRC and state officials too willing to accept what Vermont Yankee tells them, while Gundersen looks at the issues more critically. 

“Skepticism is the hallmark of science,” she said. “Arnie has carried that skepticism with him.” 

O’Brien cautioned that legislators and the public should be careful about where they get their information, that too many people are eager to blow the tritium issue, for example, out of proportion. 

“People should pay attention to the experts,” he said, citing his department, the Health Department and the NRC. Of Gundersen, he said, “If his assertions have merit, they will stand up to the scrutiny.”

Contact Terri Hallenbeck at 651-4887 or [email protected]. To have Free Press headlines delivered free to your e-mail, sign up atwww.burlingtonfreepress.com/newsletters.