Truth Boogies

Dear God,

I knowst. It's not August any more, or at least it's not where you and most people are. But at Vermont Yankee, we have our own timetable. For example, it's still the 1970s in terms of how we envision the world's energy future.

Though, it's true, I haven't prayed 'lo this long time. August whatever, to be exact. I'm sorry, Lord. But in my defense I've not really been remiss.

I've been studying singing.

Really! It's an amazing way to spend one's vacation, and a bit of a stretch for me to have done at my age, what with even my speaking voice beginning to sound like a cross between a very old Harry Belafonte and a very young Pee Wee Herman. But, as it turns out, I should have started my singing lessons long ago. For I've learned that, if one holds one's tongue in just the right position, one can resonate in one's nasal passages the vibrations of the vocal chords, and thereby fully support one's voice as it emerges. One ends up sounding angelic, reliable, invincible--like the very embodiment of truthfulness. Imagine how this could have come in handy over the years.

Let me demonstrate. I'll announce the August and September news that I, in my absence, missed. Your job will be to raise your hand if anything I say sounds like anything other than a bold-faced lie:

1. The independent oversight panel opined that Vermont Yankee's corporate culture needs an overhaul and, and that VY has to begin providing reliable information to regulators and legislators.
   
2. VY's decommissioning fund is still about half a billion dollars short.
   
3. People are still mad at VY for lying to the oversight panel and to regulators.
   
4. The NRC has slapped VY's wrists with a ruler (but, thank You, not with a new rule) for endangering its workers.
   
5. Entergy has been compelled to take part in the 2013 energy capacity auction, despite the fact that it has no assurance VY will be in operation in 2013.
   
6. There are rumors that Entergy wants to sell VY, reason being that the Vermont legislature might be willing to allow VY to operate for an additional 20 years if any company other than Entergy were running it.
   
7. Some kook in Brattleboro has put a referendum on the ballot, and he has done so without clarifying what "eminent domain" could possibly have to do with nudity.
   
8. The Global Wind Energy council predicts that, within four years, installed power capacity from wind turbines around the world will probably rival the potential generation of electricity from nuclear plants.
   
9. The state of Connecticut has been awarded $40 million in a nuclear waste dispute. That's because no one can figure out what to do with the waste from the decommissioned Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant.
   
10. The old ladies attacked us again.
    

Hmmm. I saw lots of hand-raising there, Lord. But, well, actually those statements sounded true because they were true. That's right. I didn't blow them out my nose.

Ok, but NOW I'm going to give you roughly the same news, only this time with the approved VY take on all of the news items. Which is to say that these pieces of news will come to you enhanced by my new nasal-reliant vocal technique. Again, raise your hand if anything I say sounds to you like the truth:

1. The independent oversight panel announced that with, with adjustments in its culture, Vermont Yankee can operate safely after 2012.
   
2. The combined efforts of the NRC, the DPS, and Vermont Yankee ensure that the fund remains adequate enoughish.
   
3. The NRC has said that the VY license request information is accurate, though they do want VY to re-evaluate its Buried Piping Inspection Program. We would actually be more than happy to do that now that we've admitted to having buried piping.
   
4. Despite the NRC's displeasure at VY's "process weaknesses" regarding worker safety, the NRC identified no issues that require VY to do anything noticeably different.
   
5. Entergy is confident Vermont Yankee will be operating in 2013--so confident that VY expressed its confidence only days after several blown fuses caused an "unusual event" emergency at the plant.
   
6. No comment.
   
7. "Eminent domain" has nothing to do with nudity. Granted, if that kook gets what he wants we will be royally exposed and, if we have the emotional capacity, embarrassed, as well.
   
8. No comment.
   
9. Really no comment.
   
10. No comment--but it was kinda fun wrestling them to the ground again.
    

I saw lots of hand raising, Lord! Good job! Yes, indeed, each and every one of them sounded like the God's truth. Hark, the herald Rob is high!

Amen,

Fake-Rob

Ho Hum

Dear Lord,

Was it your divine intervention that confused Rod Blagojevich's jurors enough to render them incapable of convicting him on 23 of the 24 counts against him? If so, do you charge by the hour?

Or maybe you've already intervened on our behalf. After all,

• The Brattleboro Reformer of August 14 reported that, "In its report to the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, submitted on July 26 and released to the public on Aug. 12, Fairewinds Associates, which is operated by Arnie and Maggie Gundersen, wrote that state agencies conspired to 'belittle the accurate analysis of Fairewinds Associates, Inc. rather than investigate the existence of underground pipes at (Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant).'" Did the masses even read that? Because if they did, I'd have though they'd have risen up in outrage and stormed either the administrative buildings in Montpelier or the nuclear power plant here in Vernon. But nada, from anyone.
  
  
• Fairewinds Associate's entire report is now on the Joint Fiscal Committee's web site. Yet no one seems to have looked up from their beach novels long enough to read it, much less comment.
  
  
• Scientific American published an article titled "Safety Concerns Have Delayed Approval of First U.S. Nuclear Reactor in Decades," and in it they quoted Fairewinds Associate's Arnie Gundersen. By doing so they might have significantly added to his credibility, furthering him on his path toward becoming a bonafide local hero. But, nah. People don't read Scientific American. It's too...wordy. So they checked their iPhones and applied sunscreen to their children as they frolicked in purposeful certitude about the Eden that is Vermont, even though they sunned themselves on the banks of the contaminated river.
  

I know you're powerful, Lord. I know you can cause frogs to fall from the sky, and that you can spread locusts across the land. So, please, be straight with me this one time. We've been unbelievably lucky of late on the PR front. Have you been pulling strings behind the curtain for us? Or is this just August?

Amen,

Fake-Rob

How Not to Write a Press Release

Dear Lord,

I got the most unfortunate email today. It was a press release from "Shut It Down," that group of old lady activists who continue to protest at our nuclear power plant.

Here is how it started: "As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant here on Tuesday, August 10, eight women blocked the gate to demand the immediate shutdown of the 38-year-old facility."

And then it went on and on and on and ON about the old ladies' arrest. What, may I ask, does the arrest of those eight women have to do with the plume of radioactive, tritiated water? Granted, the first item (the arrest), by virtue of being recent, is legit news. But the second item (the leak) is old news, and leading the press release with that information turns a newsworthy event into a real snorer. Get over the leak, ladies! Move on!



Imagine if I were to have written some of VY's recent, snappy press releases with the old ladies' puerile phrasing:

1. As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, "the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station automatically shut down.... [But] there has been no release of radiation...."
   
   
2. As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, "Vermont Yankee control room operators brought the 650 megawatt nuclear power plant back into service. There was a delay early Sunday morning while reconnecting to the New England power grid when operators noticed that generator readings were different than expected and disconnected from the grid...."
   
   
3. As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, "a recently completed root cause analysis of a tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant determined that leak was primarily caused by an earlier design deficiency and inadequate inspection of an underground area of the plant that could not be accessed."
   
   
4. As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, "the plant [operated] at 100% power...."
   
   and
   
   
5. As a plume of radioactive, tritiated water flowed toward the Connecticut River from Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, Entergy's Chairman and CEO, J. Wayne Leonard said, "This is how Entergy operates."
   

I would be the laughing stock of the PR world, right? Take a lesson, ladies!

Amen,

Fake-Rob

I Really Need You Tonight!

Dear God,

When you're trying not to nod off at the wheel, do you sing to yourself really loudly with the windows open—especially on the highway, but sometimes even if you're driving through a sleepy neighborhood?

I've stopped drinking coffee because of what it does to my stomach. So this morning on my way to work I couldn't quite keep my eyes opened. I get in early; most people weren't awake when I was driving in today. And so I was singing, and at the same time I was thinking about tonight's Public Service Board meeting, where …

… [t]he Public Service Board will take public testimony at a hearing tonight on whether the Vernon nuclear plant should be shut down. Several groups have submitted petitions supporting the plant's shutdown based on recent radioactive leaks discovered on Yankee's grounds.

I know I've said this before, Lord, but I'm worried. And I'm thinking that tonight it would be really great if some Vermont Yankee supporters could show up and tell everyone about how the folks at VY are all healthy, normal, careful people with a refurbished I Am Vermont Yankee website to prove it. This iteration of our website features a whole bunch of good-looking people who aren't even getting fired or indicted.

So, like I said, I was driving to work early. I was probably too sleepy to be at the wheel. And I opened my windows wide and I sang my favorite song from the 1980s. Really, it's our plant's theme song. Do you know "Total Eclipse of the Heart?"

Turn around, Bright Eyes. Every now and then I fall apart.

Just let that line sink in, Lord. We do at Vermont Yankee. Over the past several years that song has become our company song. When we sing it in the cafeteria it's as though, our voices merged in joy, we have become the spirit of the plant.

Anyway, I delivered that line a couple of long, loud times--maybe even more than that because it felt so damn good to emote. And then I saw lights coming on in the houses around me. So I sang even more loudly. Hey, people might have been annoyed at being awakened, but I felt like the town crier, delivering an essential message to every one of our supporters in the area. Or every two. All seventeen. Whatever.

And here it is, God. I'll sing it to you. It's beautiful, and it means so much to us. It's not just the line about falling apart that's significant. There are also lines about "making it right," "taking it to the end of the line," always "being in the dark," and "living in a powder keg and giving off sparks."

But God? Before I start singing, just let me say that I really do need you tonight, at 7pm at BUHS. Bring friends.

I'll start off plaintively, though not in the legal sense. And as I sing, please imagine the Vermont Yankee employees that you see at the refurbished I Am Vermont Yankee website holding hands, swaying to the music, and lifting their voices to the heavens.

…And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever
And we'll only be making it right
Cause we'll never be wrong together
We can take it to the end of the line
Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks

Here I'm going to get really loud.

I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Now I'll soften, because this is the part of the song that makes all of us at VY weep.

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart.

Amen,

Fake-Rob

Newton Says...

Dear God,

What goes down must come up. And then go down. Whatevsies.

Just a blink of an eye ago our stock price dropped. Today, despite the fact that trading volume for Entergy was slightly lower than normal, there was an unusual volume (about six times normal) of call contracts traded. That and we had an unusually low put/call ratio. Which, according to Market Intellisearch, indicates that "[Entergy] stock is expected to make a move."

In what direction I can't say, because I don't know what CEO J. Wayne Leonard has planned. Maybe this has something to do with Vermont lawmakers calling for phenomenally expensive repairs at Vermont Yankee.

But maybe it has to do with doubts about the long-term viability of cooling our plant with Connecticut River water. Did you see the New York Times article noting that the planet is drying up faster than the global warming folks had predicted, and that water scarcity recently forced the temporary closing of nuclear power plants in Australia, France, Germany, Romania and Spain?

There's no indication in today's weird put and call numbers about what's up or why. All I know for sure is that CEO J. Wayne Leonard has already admitted that nuclear power is not a good business risk for the 21st century.

But there is good news in all of this. Finally I have a bit of intelligence about Entergy that Arnie Gundersen didn't beat me to. Take that, Arnie! And your little dog, too!

Amen,

Fake-Rob

The Devil Is in the Details

Dear God,


Please consider two related news items:

• Apparently BP thought its oil spill could be 100 times larger than it told Congress.
  
  
• Five of the world's seven sea turtle species are threatened by the BP oil spill.
  

I like these two news items because, when considered together, they reveal how easily the public can be misled by details. Let's do some math together so I can show you what I mean. If the oil spill were really 100 times larger than BP told Congress, wouldn't that mean that 500 of the world's 7 turtle species would be threatened by the oil spill? Well, no, 'cause that's impossible! Such a statement doesn't even make sense! But the average Joe might not appreciate that right away. Reading those two headlines, Average Joe might get outrageously mad at BP, unnecessarily.

My point, you see, is that paying undue attention to details in headlines can exponentially increase confusion.

Playing down the details is therefore a large part of what I do at Entergy Vermont Yankee. It's a large part of what our engineers do, too. For example, according to a "report" by our lawyers, Dave McElwee tried hard to protect Arnie Gundersen from certain details about underground piping. And now he's catching heat for that! But think about it carefully, God. Persistently, insistently, and always acting in official capacity on behalf of the state legislature's Joint Fiscal Committee, Arnie had been asking, "Is there underground piping that carries radioactivity at VY?" Eventually Dave answered in the negative. Why? Not because he wanted to mislead, but because the details of the correct answer (affirmative) would only have confused Arnie--about whether he had the right to ask that specific question. Arnie believed that he did. Dave, apparently, fervently hoped that Arnie did not.

If Dave had intentionally given the wrong answer 100 times more frequently to Arnie than he did, would he have been 100 times more guilty of intentionally misleading Arnie? Let's do the math.

• Dave obfuscated the truth. Mathematically speaking, though, the sincerity of Dave's hope that Arnie wasn't entitled to ask about the truth rendered "0" the measure to which Dave was guilty of intentionally misleading.
  
  
• What's 100 times 0? 0.
  
  
• Is 0 > 0? Of course not. Not ever.
  
  
• Ipso facto, even if Dave had intentionally given the wrong answer 100 times more frequently than he did, he would not have been guilty of intentionally misleading.
  

But don't take my word for it, God. Read any math text book for the axiom about multiplying numbers by 0. And read the Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP "Report of Investigation: Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee", pages 105-113, for an incredible blow-by-blow description of how:

• Arnie doggedly and repeatedly asked a simple question about piping.
  
  
• Officials at Vermont Yankee were aghast at having to provide Arnie, an official representative of the state of Vermont, with information.
  
  
• There was at least one official of the state of Vermont with whom officials at Vermont Yankee felt considerably more comfortable. It was Bill Irwin, Vermont's top radiological officer. He seemed so damn sympathetic to Vermont Yankee's desire to keep Arnie out of the information loop. Bill even wrote in an email to Dave that, "The comments of Mr. Gundersen [about the possibility of the existence of underground piping] are hyperbole and, in my opinion, bordering [sic] on irresponsibility."
  
  
• Bill may actually have considered himself very much part of the VY "team." He marked a nearly identical email he sent to Uldis Vanags, the state's nuclear engineer, as "For Internal Use Only!!!!". Still, he seems to have copied the email to Dave. Dave circulated the email to a large handful of VY executives. You gotta love those four exclamation points, God. Without the emphasis they add to the words "internal" and "only" I never would have appreciated how closely the interests of Vermont Yankee and the Douglas administration are intertwined.
  
  
• Apparently a whole lot of conversations happened at VY among top engineers and executives about underground piping. Upon questioning, however, none of the engineers and executives could remember very many details of those conversations. This is probably a good thing because, as I've noted above, details can confuse.
  

The "report" of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP is priceless, Lord, especially that 8-page section, 105-113. Those pages make it as undeniable as the seven mysteries of the Church that McElwee didn't intentionally mislead. Rather, he intentionally conveyed information that wasn't the truth and represented it as the full truth.

If this all seems like splitting hairs, Lord, maybe some more math will help you keep your perspective. The associative law of mathematics states that in repeated multiplication or addition, grouping does not matter. The associative law of how business is done in Vermont evidently states that repeated groupings between state employees and corporate employees does not matter.

Speaking of which, Lord, Bill Irwin asked me to tell you "Hey!"

Amen,

Fake-Rob

There Goes the Neighborhool

Dear God,

BP has agreed to suspend paying a dividend and to set up a $20 billion fund for oil spill claims.

It's like the levy breaking on Lake Pontchartrain. Woosh. Things will never again be quite the same.

If BP can fold to pressure in this way, how will FirstEnergy fare? In Toledo, its Davis-Besse nuclear power plant (which once almost blew its lid) has sprouted cracks and flaws in as many as 16 critical parts. Will FirstEnergy post enough money to compensate Toledo and even Cleveland for the loss of all business and, indeed, people if something awful were to happen?

God, I hope not.

Because if they do, what will happen to us? Shay Totten has called us out for our Leak of the Week club. He has also pointed out that we tend to wait until late on a Friday to announce the flavor of our latest leak. This revelation may lead to an unnerving increase in the purchase of Saturday papers … or to a demand that Vermont Yankee pony up for the shortfall in its decommissioning fund.

Add our recent scram, and our admission that Strontium-90 was in the soil all along. This has been the kind of month that leads a PR guy to drink. It's also led our company's CEO to say that the nuclear businesses is not a good business risk.

There goes the neighborhood. FOR SALE notices will be going up first thing you know. Rats will start leaving this sinking ship. Signs of change are everywhere. Our IAmVY.com site is gone. And remember Curt Hébert's video recital of Rudyard Kipling's "IF"?

Gone.

Someone took it down from YouTube. Someone even took Curt Hébert "down," and he was supposed to fix everything for Entergy up here after, you know, they took down Jay Thayer.

Lord, Lord, Lord have mercy, for (apparently) we know not what we do.

Amen,

Fake-Rob