by Sue Sturgis
New Orleans-based power giant Entergy is in hot water following
revelations that its Vermont Yankee nuclear plant has leaked
radioactive contamination to the environment—and its trouble isn’t
limited to Vermont.
The Mississippi State Attorney General is also taking aim at the
company, questioning Entergy’s recent transfer of more than $1 billion
from its parent company that oversees its Mississippi operations to its
troubled nuclear division.
Some
background: In January of this year, it was reported that groundwater
monitoring wells at Entergy’s Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, Vt. were
contaminated with tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen routinely
created in nuclear power plants. In early February, the plant reported
that a new groundwater monitoring well at the plant showed levels of
tritium at about 775,000 picocuries per liter—more than 37 times the
federal drinking water limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter.
Subsequent tests showed even more dramatic levels of contamination, with direct testing of groundwater on Feb. 6 detecting tritium at levels of 2.45 million picocuries per liter—almost the same concentration found in reactor process water, which
typically has about 2.9 million picocuries of tritium per liter. The
Vermont Department of Health has raised concerns that the contamination
is making its way to the nearby Connecticut River.
The tritium
contamination has been linked to corroded underground pipes at the
38-year-old plant, where a cooling tower also collapsed in 2007 due
corrosion of its support structure.
Adding to the controversy
over the tritium contamination is the fact that Entergy had long denied
that Vermont Yankee had the kind of underground piping system linked to
such leaks, which are so common in the aging U.S. commercial nuclear
fleet that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has launched a special review of the problem.
In
the summer of 2008, Vermont lawmakers created a special panel of
nuclear experts to investigate Vermont Yankee’s reliability in light of
its intention to receive a 20-year extension of its operating license.
It was to that panel that Entergy officials—at times under oath—insisted there was no such underground pipe system, Vermont’s Times
Argus newspaper reports:
With revelations … that Vermont Yankee is leaking tritium—a radioactive isotope—into nearby groundwater, it became clear that those statements were wrong. Entergy calls it a “miscommunication” and anti-nuclear activists call it a bald lie.
Last week,
amid public uproar over the revelations of the tritium leak and
Entergy’s misleading claims, the Vermont Senate voted 24-6 to deny the
plant the necessary state permission to continue its operations past
2012, when its federal operating license expires. Since that state’s
law requires both chambers of the General Assembly to approve any
nuclear plant relicensing, it appears likely that Entergy will be
forced to close the plant unless the state Senate revisits its vote. If
shut down, Vermont Yankee would become the first U.S. nuclear power
plant to go offline since 1998.
Two of Vermont’s leading environmental organizations have asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a criminal probe into
Entergy’s provision of false information under oath and carelessly
disregard of obligations to maintain critical power plant systems,
while the governor in neighboring New Hampshire has called for an NRC investigation.
Meanwhile, Entergy hired an outside law firm to investigate the misleading statements made to Vermont officials. The probe found the company’s employees did not intentionally mislead anyone but failed
“to specific the context of their communication” which “led to
misunderstandings.” The company has placed five senior Vermont Yankee
employees on administrative leave, reprimanded an another six, and
passed the probe’s findings on to the Vermont Attorney General.
But
that’s not the end of Entergy’s woes: The company is also facing
scrutiny closer to home in neighboring Mississippi, where Attorney
General Jim Hood is looking into its recent transfer of $1.3 billion from its utility division that provides retail electric services to
Mississippi residents to its division that operates 10 nuclear power
plants.
“My translation of the [transfer] means that the
regulated utilities like Entergy Mississippi, which are subsidiaries of
Entergy Corp., put $1.3 billion less in their pockets in 2009,” Hood
said in a letter to Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell. “One of
my claims in Mississippi is that Entergy Corp. has wrongfully
transferred money from the regulated utilities to Entergy’s Nuclear
businesses and that money should be returned to Mississippi ratepayers.”
Hood
wants to know what the source was for the $1.3 billion cash payment to
its nuclear program, the purpose of the transfer, and whether Entergy
plans to use any of the money to pay for the decommissioning of its
malfunctioning nuclear plants.
“The ratepayers of Mississippi—and the rest of those inside Entergy’s service area—have a right to
know where their hard-earned money is going, and what it is being used
for,” Hood said. “When our ratepayers are paying their light bills each
month, they should not have to worry that their dollars are headed to
Vermont to pay for a leaking nuclear reactor.”
(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)
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