A Pre-Thanksgiving Prayer of Thanks

Dear God,

As the season of Thanksgiving approaches, I have something special I'd like to give thanks for. It is that here in Vermont we seem to have almost gotten through 2007 forgetting entirely to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near disaster. You see, in late winter of 2002 that plant shut down for refueling. It was during the refueling shutdown that engineers discovered that, over the course of six years of inadequate inspections, corrosive coolant had been leaking from the core. The coolant had created a six-by-five-by-four inch cavity in the liner of the core. All that remained of the liner was a warped piece of steel a little thicker than tin foil. It and it alone contained approximately 2500 psi of highly radioactive internal environment. Had the pressure burst through the remaining lining and into the reactor containment building, it might have set in motion a core meltdown. Toledo is 21 miles away from the Davis-Besse plant.

So, yes, thanks for protecting the people of Toledo five years ago, but, also, thanks for helping us forget to celebrate that near miss here this year. You see, that plant's maintenance schedules and procedures were lax, and our plant's maintenance schedules and procedures are lax--or so the NRC suggested might be the case in a statement yesterday about two recent accidents at the plant. We don't need any parallels drawn between Vermont Yankee and the second biggest embarrassment the nuclear industry has ever had (the biggest being Three Mile Island).

For, as you know, we at Vermont Yankee are in the midst of a battle to extend the license of our aging plant and to keep it operating at 120% of capacity, to boot. In the midst of all this a cooling tower collapsed and then, 10 days later, a failure in a turbine valve caused an automatic shutdown of the plant. The NRC seems to have strayed "off message" with their statement yesterday but I do hope that you'll stay "on." Repeat the message after me, please: "The accidents are irrelevant to the Vermont Yankee relicensing application."

Amen, Lord. Thank you again. And, hey! It'll be turkey at my house this year!

Fake-Rob