What the Fukashima? and dozens of other anti-nuclear messages graced the bridges of the Interstate Highway from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Burlington, Vermont, reminding Columbus Day weekend leaf peepers that were passing close to the evacuation zone of theVermont Yankeenuclear power plant,still operatingpast it’s 40-year design life.
What the Fukushima? refers to the basicdesignofthe 1972 Vermont Yankee, which used the same General Electric boiling water reactor technology as the 1971 Fukushima plants that failed in Japan in March 2011.
Vermont Yankee’s original license expired on March 2012, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already granted a 20-year license renewal to the plant’s owner, Entergy Corp. of Louisiana.The Fukushima #1 plant had been scheduled for decommissioning in 2011, but had been granted a ten-year renewal before the tsunami hit.
Although it continues to keep operating effectively most of the time, Vermont Yankee remainsentangledin legal, political, and environmentaldisputes, in the context of a largelyhostilepublic.The State of Vermont is fighting Entergy in federalcourt.The Vermont Legislature has already voted once to close the plant and has passed a tax bill to make up for revenue Entergy presently refuses to pay.
Environmentally, Vermont Yankee has suffered a long string of events, including the collapse of a heating tower, various leaks of radioactivity, and seasonal overheating of the water in the Connecticut River.
In September, Vermont startedshippinglow level radioactivewastefrom the University of Vermont and a Burlington hospital to Andrews County,Texas, bytrucksusing public highways.This is thefirstsuch shipment under an agreement approved 20 years earlier, the Texas-Vermont Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact.VermontYankeehas also shipped some its radioactive waste to the same dump, a 15,000 acre site in a poor area that straddles the Texas-New Mexico border.
The unguardedtransportof nuclear waste on public highways has been controversial in the past in relation to nuclear weapons waste.InTexas, early alarms have been sounded about thesafetyof shipping this waste to the remote site owned by HaroldSimmons, a Dallas billionaire and heavy Republican bankroller, as described in the Dallas-Fort WorthStar-Telegram.
Thepaperalso reported: In the past eight years, 72 incidents nationwide involving trucks carrying radioactive material on highways have caused $2.4 million in damage and one death, the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration says.
The Texas dump expects to receive radioactive waste from 36 states, including Vermont, but this wasn’t the direct target of the holiday weekend banner drop along the Interstate.
Shut down Before Meltdown was the message on the bridge in South Royalton, home of the Vermont Law School.You Are In A Nuclear Reactor Zone is said on the Bridge in Bernardston, just over the Massachusetts border from Yankee’s location next to the Connecticut River in Vernon.Yankee is Vermont’s only nuclear power plant.
The bridge banners were the work of anti-nuclear affinity groups from both states, part of regional resistance to nuclear power older than the plant itself.Members of the Sage Alliance, the affinity groups’ names include Shut It Down, Sunflower Brigade, Downstreamers and the VT Yankee Decommissioning Alliance.
