Huge Madoff-Style Fraud Discovered at Vermont Yankee

Dear God,

The absolute worst has happened at Vermont Yankee, and it's not a meltdown, though that's what we've spent the last 40 years fearing.

The independent panel overseeing a comprehensive vertical audit of the reliability of Vermont Yankee's systems, structures and components has discovered that, just as Bernie Madoff ran an investment management company that was actually a Ponzi scheme, Entergy has been running a nuclear power plant that is actually a non-functioning collection of plungers, Roto Rooters, and rolls of Charmin.

According to the independent oversight panel, upon receiving the keys to the plant from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corporation in July, 2002, Entergy began secretly dismantling the plant and sending its tiniest radioactive parts by courier pigeon to nuclear weapons facilities around the world. As the pigeons became irradiated, they grew larger. Now, more than six years into the fraud, the pigeons are so large that they resemble 18-wheelers, and large sections of the plant easily find their way onto I-91.

So what is at Vermont Yankee if not a nuclear power plant? Initially, all that the independent oversight panel found was battle gear that I had bought the other day. But further sleuthing on the part of the panel has revealed a pneumatic tube flooded with southward-moving greenbacks and connecting Vernon, Vermont directly to Entergy's New Orleans headquarters at 639 Loyola Ave.

While the people of Vermont have long expressed dismay at the amount of cash that leaves the Vermont economy for Louisiana and Cayman Island coffers, they were aghast to learn just how quickly the out-of-state, out-of-mind transition is. Many were therefore pleased to hear that a second pneumatic tube running directly from 639 Loyola Ave. to the Department of Public Services office in Montpelier, Vermont was also discovered. In this tube the cash flows northward.

This week the collapse of Bernie Madoff's fraud led his dupes to wonder how Madoff had fooled so many for so long. Similar questions have already arisen in the Vermont Yankee fraud. Apparently this is a large part of the answer:

First, in typical Ponzi fashion, Vermont Yankee used some small percentage of its Vermont receivables to buy power from renewable power sources and redirect it into the New England grid. Second, Vermont Yankee had installed a 100-foot-high, 1200-gallon atomizer and programmed it to randomly spay radiation-laced steam into the air above the plant, thereby increasing fence line radiation levels at Vermont Yankee and ramping up the rate of thyroid cancers throughout the Northeast in a way that caught the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and, at the same time, reassured normally skeptical anti-nukers that there was a problem requiring their busy-bee activism.

Late Sunday night, the independent oversight panel detached the large squirty thingy that activates the atomizer, and the enormous cancer threat presented by Vermont Yankee is now a thing of the past. The panel's only remaining task is to catch those damn pigeons before the pigeons catch them, at which point Vermont will be delivered from its long nuclear nightmare.

To mix metaphors (and news stories) here, when informed by the Brattleboro Reformer that the nuclear power plant he had long defended as good for Vermonters had in fact been re-designed to harm Vermonters as well as rob them blind, Governor Jim Douglas seemed to be in denial. "I’ve got this thing," Douglas said, in his best Legs Diamond style, "and it’s [expletive] golden. And I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not going to do it. And I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

Amen,

Fake-Rob