VERNON, Vermont — Just after noon Monday, Vermont Yankee’s nuclear reactor had ceased operation.
Forever.
There will be no refueling, no restart, no bringing the plant back online as has happened roughly every 18 months since 1972.
It will become the fourth nuclear power plant in New England to close.
Vermont Yankee’s parent company, Entergy Corp., announced in August 2013 that it would close the facility at the end of 2014 because it was no longer financially viable.
The closure is tough, Keene resident John R. Twarog, a shift manager in Vermont Yankee’s operation department, said Sunday, but more heartbreaking will be Jan. 19, when the first wave of layoffs will occur. The departing group will total 165 people of the facility’s 554 employees, according to Vermont Yankee officials.
Twarog, who has been at Vermont Yankee for 15 years, won’t be among them, as he was offered a position that will keep him at the plant until April 2016. But he knows many who will be, including some on the crew that he oversees.
“I have a lot of friends moving on to new endeavors,” he said. “It’s a shame the economics don’t support the continued operations of the plant.”
In April 2016, staffing levels at Vermont Yankee will be cut to 127, according to company officials. Those levels will decrease again after 2020 to 50 or 60 people, they said.
A report released shortly before Christmas by the Brattleboro Development Credit Corp., the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, the Southwest Region Planning Commission and the Windham Regional Commission, provided some insight into a closure-related economic loss that officials with the organizations called “tremendous.”
According to the study, the tri-state region will lose more than 1,100 jobs and $480 million in annual economic activity over the next seven years in the wake of the plant’s closure and subsequent decommissioning.
The closure also takes away a major power generation resource for New England, which energy policy experts in Maine fear could exacerbate price spikes from a bottleneck of natural gas pipelines that can drive up power prices in the winter.
Twarog said while there has been a lot of talk about the shutdown, he and other employees also have to maintain their focus in getting to Jan. 19.
“I just want people to understand we’ve operated the plant safely, and will continue to operate the plant safely into the phases of the decommission,” he said.
For some, it’ll be easy to say that Dec. 29, 2014, had been 42 years in the making since Vermont Yankee came online in 1972. But back then, nuclear energy was the future, despite protests, a clean way of powering the world and the focus of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program of the 1950s.
Windham County, Vermont, was on the cutting edge even though the Vermont Yankee project was controversial from its earliest days.
Construction of the facility began in 1967, much to the dismay of many people, including Frances H. Crowe, and her now late husband, Thomas, both of Northampton, Massachusetts. Dr. Thomas Crowe was a radiologist. The couple had been protesting Vermont Yankee since before it was built, and Crowe, now 95, continues to do so today.
“It was sold to the people that it was a safe and cheap form of electricity generation, and it was subsidized by the government,” Crowe said Sunday. “That was very hard to compete against.”
Crowe, who is also a well-known peace activist, said she is pleased Vermont Yankee is shutting down for good, but today’s closure marks just the beginning.
“It’s going to be a long time before they have all those spent fuel rods and radiation out of the plant,” she said. “I hope they do it safely.”
According to Vermont Yankee’s site assessment study, which was released in October, the spent fuel stored on the site will move through three stages during the decommissioning process.
The first will be wet and dry storage of spent fuel starting the day of the shutdown through late 2020, according to the study.
From there, all spent fuel will be kept in on-site dry storage from 2021 through about 2052, and then removed from the property in late 2052, the study stated.
But the report also says decommissioning could be completed as early as the 2040s under certain financial situations.
The latest the dismantling and decommissioning of the plant could begin is in 2069, and the property wouldn’t be released for unrestricted use until 2075 when site restoration was complete, according to the study.
Crowe said she’d rather see the spent fuel rods put into dry cask storage right away because the plant is very dangerous as long as the fuel rods aren’t in dry cask storage. They could be susceptible to a terrorist attack or the effects of a serious storm, she said.
“It’s a good feeling that at least these nuclear power plants now are being phased out. It’s not good to hear people in the government talking about building more nuclear weapons and nuclear power. It’s all under corporate influence, and that we know is the great problem,” she said.
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