News

VT Yankee Vote Seen Unlikely This Year

January 15, 2009

(The Associated Press) By DAVE GRAM Associated Press Writer

A key Vermont lawmaker said Thursday it's unlikely the
Legislature will get to a vote this year on whether the Vermont Yankee
nuclear plant's license should be expended beyond its current 2012
expiration date.

Sen. Virginia Lyons, D-Chittenden and chairwoman of the Senate
Natural Resources and Energy Committee, made the comment after hearing
a morning's worth of testimony about the Vernon reactor.

A legislative consultant, Ezra Hausman, told three committees
gathered at a hearing that a consultant to the state Department of
Public Service had used overly optimistic assumptions about Vermont
Yankee's future.

Hausman, of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Synapse Energy Economics,
cautioned that any assumptions about future energy prices or about the
operations of a nuclear plant for 60 years - the period Vermont Yankee
hopes to run if it gets the license extension - are open to question.

"There are no nuclear plants that have operated for 60 years.
There is simply no experience by which to judge" the likely future performance
of Vermont Yankee, he said.

What evidence there is, though, leads him to conclude that the
$1.9 billion in benefits a state-commissioned study found likely from
relicensing Vermont Yankee was overly optimistic.

Lyons said it will take lawmakers some time to slog through all
the data related to the plant.

"The question I think is most compelling was how do we look at
our energy future ... and what assumptions do we make about it?" she
said.

Several lawmakers zeroed in on similar issues, questioning an
assumption, for example, that Vermont's electricity demand would grow
by 3 percent a year during the license extension period while recently
it has grown at 1.5 percent and the state now is mired deep in
recession.

Meanwhile Thursday, Gov. Jim Douglas said lawmakers should push
ahead with a vote this year even if it's not known before they vote
how much power from Vermont Yankee will cost Vermont's utilities after
2012. Several lawmakers have been asking for plant owner Entergy
Nuclear to complete negotiations on a new power purchase agreement
with the utilities before they sign off on a license extension.

"I hope we'll have some more information, but I don't know if we
will," Douglas said of Vermont Yankee.

Also Thursday, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and
Citizens Action Network, two groups advocating closure of Vermont
Yankee in 2012 if
not before, held a news conference to criticize the plant's recent
performance record.

James Moore of VPIRG and Robert Stannard of CAN cited a December
report by another state consultant saying Vermont Yankee had ranked
near the bottom of three classes in reliability recently. Those
groupings were all U.S. reactors, those of similar age and design as
Vermont Yankee and those owned by Entergy.

With the Legislature to vote this year or next on whether the
plant should be relicensed, Stannard said it should be expected that
the nuclear plant would be putting on its best performance.

"If this is their 'A' game, Vermonters should be very concerned,"
Stannard said.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams said the performance
record cited in the December report included a rough spot the plant
hit in the summer of 2007, when a cooling tower collapsed. The report
uses reliability reports on an 18-month rolling average, Williams
said, adding that by spring, the plant expects to return to "the
median within the industry."