Stop the Presses!

Dear Lord,

Wait a minute. Sometimes my own news cycle gets ahead of me.

Wednesday's Reuters story said that Vermont Yankee would stay at 100% power while fixing a new leak of mildly radioactive water. According to the story, we're going to use essentially the same stuff you shoot into your tire when it's leaking air. It won't really fix the tire, but you can make it to the nearest gas station.

But Thursday's Reuter's story says that Vermont Yankee will cut power to 40%.

Confusing?

Yes, but I think I'm on the verge of figuring this out. See, if you read down further in Thursday's Reuter's story you'll see that it's about a second new leak. This one is in the feed water system. Mildly radioactive water is leaking at a rate of about 60 drops per minute. This leak was discovered Thursday morning on a 24-inch pipe. That's the leak we're powering down to 40% about.

The leak that was the subject of Wednesday's story has been going on for about two weeks now. We're losing about 2-1/2 gallons of mildly radioactive water a minute from the reactor's water cleanout system. Aside from using a little Spare Tire in a Can, we're going to ignore it until 2010—or until we can make it to a gas station, whichever comes first.

Ok. Now I understand. You can start the presses up again. In the meanwhile, if anyone from the Reformer or, heaven forbid, the Rutland Herald calls about these leaks, we at Vermont Yankee are going to all try to stay on message as well as we can. That message is:

One leak, two leak,
Red leak, blue leak.
Black leak, blue leak,
Old leak, new leak.
This one has a little star.
This one has a little car.
Say, what a lot of leaks there are!
We see them come,
We see them go.
Some are fast
And some are slow….


Amen,

Fake-Rob