When the Vermont legislature convenes for the second year of its 2009-10 session in January, it will be poised to make a historic decision regarding the future of Vermonters facing the risks and costs of living with the Vermont Yankee (VY) nuclear reactor in Vernon.
If the legislature does not give its explicit approval, Entergy Nuclear, the Louisiana corporation that runs VY will not be able to extend the operation of plant beyond the original shut-down down date in 2012.
Last year 36 Vermont town meetings voted to approve a resolution calling: for Vermont Yankee to not continue operating past 2012, for Entergy Nuclear to fully fund the decommissioning costs, and for the state legislature to embrace clean and safe power production using non-nuclear sources like hydro, wind, solar or bio-mass.
This year, 14 more towns have the resolution on their town meeting warnings, and two more would have (Rockingham and Fayston) if their selectboards had not voted against democracy and against citizen involvement and refused to put them on the warning in spite of the fact that the towns' residents had gathered more than enough signatures and had turned them in before the deadline.
Now a radioactive plume of tritium, cobalt and perhaps other radioactive substances is contaminating the ground around the plant and threatens to contaminate the health of those in Vernon who live near the plant (not to mention the elemenarty school just across the street from the reactor).
The Entergy chief of operations at VY has been suspended from his job because his testimony to the legislature about underground pipes at the plant was false. An engineer at the plant who also gave false information about the pipes has disappeared from his prominent earlier placement in a VY ad campaign that was trying to make Vermonters feel good about Entergy Nuclear's trustworthyness.
In spite of all this,Entergy Nuclear still has a small army of lobbyists working hard to convince our representatives that by allowing Entergy to profit from a license extension, they somehow will be acting in our interests as well. We know better. And it is especially important that during this year of decision, our representatives hear the voices of Vermonters as much as they are hearing from Entergy.
So we are once again encouraging Vermonters to bring this issue up for consideration at Town meetings in March of 2010, to help inform our representatives about just where we stand on the issue. Below you can read the resolution that will be debated in this year's town meetings.
You could bring this resolution up for a vote in your town by bringing it up as “other business to come before the town”. We will be glad to help you do the preparation for such a vote. Now more than ever, Vermonters need to turn up the volume so our representatives and Senators in Montpelier know that 40 years of a leaky nuclear reactor run by an untrustworthy corporation are enough.
We will provide fact sheets about VY. With your representatives' contact info added on the back, these sheets can make it easy for every signer of the petition to contact their legislative reps. Although Entergy's lobbyists can use their money to try to overwhelm our legislature, the individual voices of Vermont citizens can counteract the Entergy spin. Every email or phone call that is sent to a Vermont representative by a constituent has a real impact on the ultimate decision. We can take pride that our citizen legislature is still closely connected to the people. Let's make sure that they hear from us loud and clear.
We learned last year that when folks are given clear and true information about Hydro-Quebec, current bio-mass capacity and potential, current and potential wind capacity and, especially, the true potential of energy efficiency and conservation, they realize that ENTERGY's scare tactics are just that, and that we can have a better energy future that is nuclear free, without nuclear waste, radiation leaks, collapsed cooling towers or any of the many other liabilities that come with continued operation of VY.
To this end, we are prepared to help you organize informational meetings/presentation/debates in your town in order to disseminate that information as well as to develop a core group for organizing and preparing to win the town meeting vote. We can offer expert speakers on the issues, as well as assistance in dealing with political or perception obstacles that may come your way.
Whether you need lots of help or have everything covered, please keep in touch about how your efforts are going and let us do anything that we can to assist. (Proposed resolution wording below) You can download the resolution and other information at
www.ReplaceVY.org
