Decommissioning of VT Yankee Dec. 10  Tuesday, December 10^th  7 p.m.

Raymond Shadis of Maine will speak at Kimball Public Library in Randolph about the hazards of the VT Yankee fuel pool storage. He will also talk about what we in Vermont can learn from the decommissioning of the Maine Yankee nuclear plant, which was completed in eight years in 2005.

Shadis was the lead citizen advocate and successful negotiator in the Maine Yankee decommissioning.  He said, “We achieved the decommissioning at the strictest cleanup standards in the nation while adhering closely to principles of reason, human respect, and non-violence.”

In contrast to Maine Yankee’s eight-year safe decommissioning, the Entergy Corporation, owners of the VT Yankee plant, says it wants to take as long as 60 years to decommission VY.

Under that scenario they would have the option to leave much of the highly radioactive spent fuel in the fuel pool before transferring the rods into safer storage in hardened concrete and steel casks stored on the site.

The VT Yankee plant is of the same design as the failed Fukushima plants. There are over 600 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel waste in the tightly packed fuel rods stored in the VT Yankee fuel pool.  To begin fuel rod removal later than five years after ceasing operation simply prolongs the period of danger to the public, risking possible nuclear meltdown or explosion.

The VT Department of Public Service recently announced it wants to use the Maine Yankee process as a model for decommissioning VY.

Within the next few weeks, the VT Public Service Board is expected to either grant or deny a Certificate of Public Good (CPG) to Entergy for its final year of operation.  If granted, that CPG could require that Entergy meet certain conditions in the decommissioning.  Otherwise, Vermont’s ability to influence the decommissioning of Vermont Yankee would be over.

The program is sponsored by the Randolph Area Peace and Justice Coalition. For information call 728-9318.

More about our esteemed guest:

Raymond Shadis has been an active nuclear safety advocate for more than thirty years. He served seven years on Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company’s Community Advisory Panel on Decommissioning. He has been an invited presenter at US Nuclear Regulatory Commission conferences; speaking on regulatory and technical issues, including Industry Voluntary Initiatives, Licensee Corrective Action Programs, and Citizen Involvement in Decommissioning. . In 2000, he served on NRC’s Initial Implementation Evaluation Panel for the new Reactor Oversight Process and was recalled to present in refining the Significance Determination Process.

He has attended numerous American Nuclear Society and industry technical conferences on decommissioning and waste storage. In 2001 he was a guest of Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company at a TLG Decommissioning Conference at Captiva Island, Florida. In 1999, he served on the Keystone Foundation National Dialogue on Decommissioning. In 2002, he completed a DOE engineering tour of Yucca Mountain. In 2006, he was the recipient of a fellowship to attend a Conference on the Aftermath of Chernobyl in Kiev, Ukraine. In 2008 he was invited to present at an international conference on decommissioning at Sosnovy Bor, Russia.