New Products in August

Dear God,

I don't know if you've noticed, but it's August down here. Remember what Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff, once said about August?

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

He said that to explain why he jimmied the timing of certain data. That jimmying helped lead our country into its current senseless war.

I'm not sure how I feel about that war, Lord, but I do know that Andrew Card was right about August. That's why we here at Vermont Yankee contacted the press in June when we wanted to introduce the "new product" of no health risk to anyone of living near Vermont Yankee. We were basing our claim on the results of the 2007 Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station Surveillance Report; full data were not available to the public at that time, and so we knew that whatever spin we put on the report couldn't be questioned.

Now it could be questioned. But now it's August!

The full report is actually dated June 30, but was only released to the public by the state of Vermont in very late July. Because people who were inclined to read the 121 page report had to carve out time to do so, their concerns are only now coming out. But tuff noogies!!!!! Everyone's in an August state of mind. How do you spell "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah?" (I spell it ""Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.")

Anyway, one of those careful readers of our report has raised some interesting questions. He is Joseph J. Mangano, MPH, MBA of the Radiation and Public Health Project. In his "Comments on 2007 Vermont Environmental Radioactivity Report" he raises serious questions about, for example: the adequacy of the instrumentation, the failure to measure for the most dangerous radioactive chemicals, the failure to measure contamination at any site immediately across the river in New Hampshire, the failure to compare data with data gathered at other nuclear power facilities, the failure to include data from other years to identify trends, the failure to measure radioactivity in the bodies of local residents, the failure to note that radioactivity in the river is much higher downstream from the plant than up, the failure to compare radiation levels to levels at sites so distant from VY that they can provide a good comparison, the inclusion of unsubstantiated assumptions about low dose radioactivity and health, and the failure to announce one particularly distressing statistic. Death rates from cancer are 7.4% higher in Windham County than in the remainder of Vermont.

But, really…. It's August. We announced in June that there were no health risks. No one cares to hear more.

Except, of course, that someone might care. There is a remote possibility that one or more general citizens in the area (legislators, to be specific) may pay attention to the questions that are being raised about the integrity of the report. It is, of course, my job to watch out for possibilities like that. And so, to appeal to the beach-bleached minds of any Vermont legislator who is concerned, I've composed some poetry that will make our product ("risk-free power") memorable, even in August.

Here goes:

A certain young lady went swimmin'
While wearing gossamer linen.
Fake-Rob got depressed
When he saw her bare whatever.
Then he warned her to swim upstream from the plant rather than downstream so as to avoid the appreciable health risks of encountering the downstream radiation.

There was a young man from War-ren'
Whose point was as sharp as a pen.
On the night of his wedding
He poked through the bedding
Whereupon he used his point to write a report claiming that there are "no significant adverse health effects from radiological exposures are likely from the operation of" Vermont Yankee.

There was a sweet lady from Brighton
Whose sexual favors were frightenin'.
She said that she'd scoff
at the idea of "enough",
But then she thought about the jobs that Vermont Yankee has brought to the area and realized that she could make a clean living in a union job and she shouted, "Enough!" at the next lout who even looked at her in a salacious manner.

On the chest of a barmaid from Bridgewater
Were inscribed all the prices of firewater.
Whilst on her behind
for the sake of the blind
Were precisely the same, but in a document that was not revealed to the public in a timely fashion.

Old Mrs. Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To give her poor dog a bone
When she bent over
The dog she called Rover
Issued a 121-page report, impressive mostly for its length, about radiation and its possible health effects . [NB, God: In the interest of honesty, I must point out that this isn't technically a limerick.]

There was an old geeser in Bristol
Who'd lost all the use of his pistol.
His wife was most willin'
To do somethin' thrillin'
And so he saw his doctor and got some Viagra. Because, hey, the 2007 Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station Surveillance Report didn't say much about cancer, so he thought he and his wife might as well make good use of all the wonderful years they had left.

Thanks for listening to my rambling thoughts, Lord. Happy vacation.

Amen,

Fake-Rob