Shut Down Yankee NOW!

The fire in this picture is not from Japan, but from the aging, leaking Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor in Vernon, Vermont.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has suspended plans to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear power plants, in response to the situation in Japan. Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont has the same power to act. Or fail to act. Vermont’s Legislature also has that power.

Act now. Tell them !

If a highly developed country like Japan, with high safety standards and norms, cannot prevent the consequences for nuclear power of an earthquake or flood, what of tiny Vermont?

Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters that U.S. reactors don’t have adequate backup power. ‘We do not believe the safety standards for U.S. nuclear reactors are enough to protect the public today’.

In other words, we aren’t as prepared as the Japanese were.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre said the agency was not granting interviews about the Japan quake.

A flood on the Connecticut River would be enough to inundate the nuclear waste that Entergy, the current owners of Vermont Yankee, have carelessly stockpiled in the flood plain. And spread radioactive waste all over the Connecticut River Valley, and contaminate the sea.

We hope and pray that Japan can bring their reactors under control. Japan has the highest level of emergency preparedness… Vermont… not so much. We share a single MedEvac helicopter with New Hampshire. Our Vermont Guard have (in defiance of the US and Vermont Constitutions) been illegally sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan… so there is NO emergency preparedness in Vermont. So where will we be, if the unthinkable happens here?

Think for yourself.

The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant.

The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.

- Scientist Dale Bridenbaugh, to ABC News. Bridenbaugh resigned from GE, the company that built the troubled GE Mark 1 reactor in Fukushima, Japan and Vernon, Vermont.

Vermont Yankee's Radioactive Plume - Right Now