... and a word about the Real Rob Williams, too. To no one's surprise, it turns out that Fake-Rob Williams and the Real Rob Williams are not the same person. The authors of this satirical blog have never even met the Real Rob Williams. We assume that he is not the sniveling, devious, inept guy that Fake-Rob is. We have given Fake-Rob those characteristics because that is how Entergy and Vermont Yankee appear to us through Real Rob's statements as well as through the statements of other Entergy and Vermont Yankee officials.
That being said, Fake-Rob is pretty normal. His favorite newspaper is "The Brattleboro Reformer." His favorite song is "Stairway to Heaven." His favorite cancer is testicular because, well, kids get sick from radiation poisoning more readily than adults do, and at least when kids get cancer, it's not often in their testicles.
Gosh. I got an email today, and the subject line was "Bomb Strontium in Baby Teeth." It linked to a article here.
By and large, I'm a cautious guy, but this idea is one I support. I mean, who wants Strontium in baby teeth? That stuff's dangerous as hell! I say bomb those baby teeth to smithereens. Bigger, healthier ones will grow in anyway. And then the back molars will come in. Bomb them, too. They hurt.
Second, remember those cute control room mutants, The Little Yanks? They couldn't run and play like other kids, and they said a bad word: Strontium-90, which itself is a mutant. (Unlike most bad words, it has more than four letters.) I first prayed about them on May 26, 2010. Well, theyyyyyyyyyre back! Trouble is, the first time we met them, they were kind of funny, confusing "sh#t," for example, with radioactive isotopes. This time, there's not much humor, except for a few laugh lines about the NRC being trustworthy. And, hey, did you know? Uranium is natural! And the outcome of Vermont refusing to give Vermont Yankee a certificate of public good for an extra 20 years of operation "will be decided in the Federal courts!" Here's a little movie, courtesy of YouTube user RobertHargraves, who was kind enough to include an "embed" link on his YouTube page.
Gotta go, Lord. It's my turn to take the control room mutant kids outside so I can forcibly stretch their little legs and arms. And necks.
J. Wayne Leonard is dumping his shares of Entergy! And it may have affected the overall value of the company. According to the website GuruFocus.com, "Chairman and CEO J Wayne Leonard sold 227,954 shares of ETR stock on 08/10/2010 at the average price of 79.11. J Wayne Leonard owns at least 360,683 shares after this. The price of the stock has decreased by 8.49% since. Other insiders have also decreased their positions in the company."
"The rat is fleeing a sinking ship" can't even begin to describe the epithets being hurled today at poor J. Wayne--"poor," of course, being a relative term considering that in October of 2008 Fortune Magazine estimated his five-year income at $45.84 million. And now, just imagine the windfall on the stock sale! Whew! (It's about $17 million, if you do the math.)
And you've seen my pictures of J. Wayne Leonard's house haven't you? I think he'll build another wing or something now, don't you?
People may call J. Wayne a "rat," but "rat" does not begin to describe him. Why, he's stuck by this old, leaking plant for so long, he should get a medal! People have cast aspersions on his spending style, his elitism, his oversight, his manners, his hiring practices, his honesty, and the fact that he's pillaged the state of Vermont without, apparently, ever once spending a personal dollar here. He's been lambasted for saying that nuclear power is not a good business risk for the 21st century, and saying that even while trying to get the state of Vermont to take a risk on nuclear power. But step back, Lord. It's not as though all those aspects of him are bad things. Truly, they just define the modern man, the man of the future, the captain of industry about town extraordinaire.
Why, I think it's fair to go so far as to say that J. Wayne Leonard is, if you will, the very model of a modern metrosexual.
Hit it, dudes! And everyone sing along!
Did you see Linda Rondstadt in that video clip? Hey, any father of Linda Rondstadt's is a friend of mine.
Amen,
Fake-Rob
PS: Unfortunately, we can't blame the tumble in Entergy stock on Governor Elect Peter Shumlin. You see, J. Wayne's sell-off pre-dated Pete's demand of Michael Colomb, Site Vice President at Vermont Yankee, that "Entergy return its extraction wells to service and ... increase the number of wells to prevent tritiated water from entering Vermont’s precious and irreplaceable aquifers." In his letter to Colomb, Pete said that, "It appears that ENVY made the decision to arbitrarily terminate the process of extracting tritiated ground water from the Vermont Yankee site as soon as 300,000-gallons of water had been removed. The tritium concentration level of the remaining on site tritiated water after the 300,000-gallon cutoff was never provided to justify that decision." Pete also pointed out that, "The following day [after stopping extraction], Entergy detected 500,000 pCi/l of tritium near [one] well and at bedrock, ... a further indication that the aquifer may be in serious jeopardy of contamination from tritium and other radioactive isotopes." Frankly, I fail to understand Pete's concern about all of this. You remember, Lord (don't you?), that Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour has already declared our tritium cleanup to be complete.
Yes, Lord, in the very week that we prematurely announced our tritium cleanup to be complete,we've announced that we've found more tritium, and this time we've found it in at least one well that used to be used for drinking water.
But, in the words of the prophet Douglas Adams, "DON'T PANIC!" This week's discovery is good news--or so my colleague Larry Smith has suggested.
I won't even pretend to explain why it's good news, because in order to explain that I would have to understand Larry's logic, which, frankly, I don't. But I do know this: No one reads the Saturday papers. And that is good news.
Yet, despite Larry's proclamation of elation, I'm sensing a general uneasiness here at Vermont Yankee. We all know that, by Monday, anti-nuke activists will be leaping from nooks and crannies and jumping to wherever it is that news cameras will point.
If I may be so bold as to express a wish in the form of an exasperative prayer, I beseech you, Lord, to arrange for said nuclear activists to drink the damn "good news" water, and to drink it tonight, Friday. Mind you, I fully support Larry in his assertion that 500 thousand pico curies per liter presents "no threat to public health." And, granted, even if it's going to kill the activists, they'll still be around on Monday. Radiation poisoning doesn't always work as quickly as one would like. Still, to watch the activists drink that water would be an "unusual event" for which I would be eternally grateful.
Just weeks after his most recent meeting with Hamid Karzai, president of one or another of those "stan" countries, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, one of the most successful imitators of senior commanders in the Taliban movement, has declared the cleanup of tritium at Vermont Yankee complete.
"You have trusted me," Mullah Mansour declared. "Now you can pay me."
The NATO plane that brought Mullah Mansour to Vernon has now helped him flee back to the hills, carrying him along with weighty bundles of Entergy shareholder cash, and leaving David O'Brien of the Department of Public Service sad that long-promised peace talks with the New England Coalition never quite happened. However, J. Wayne Leonard, CEO of Entergy, expressed his gratitude that contaminated groundwater, now removed from Vernon, would be shipped to Tennessee, where public education has been in crisis for so long that the citizenry is unusually easy to push around. Stepping away from an indoor pool party at his mansion, Mr. Leonard watched with loving eyes as Mullah Mansour's plane passed over Louisiana. "Who was that masked man?" he wondered fondly.
In the meanwhile, Arnie Gundersen tried frantically to explain to the media that the tritium problem was not, in fact solved. The extraction wells were still pumping contaminated water when they were shut down. They were not shut down because the tritium issue was "over," but rather because Entergy did not want to pay to winterize the wells. Had they paid for the wells, Gundersen explained, they could not have afforded to pay Mullah Monsour.
Only moments after Gundersen started his b*tching and moaning, a grainy, ill-shot video was received by news stations across America. An unidentified but very tall actor attached to a styrofoam dialysis machine clearly said, "We will never tire of the tritium fight. J. Wayne is great. So is God."
After spending $160 million of her own fortune on a losing campaign to be the governor of California, former eBay executive Meg Whitman is hard pressed for money, and has agreed to work for commission in her attempt to sell Vermont Yankee on eBay.
Of course, it's up to me to prepare the press release announcing the unconventional arrangement. I asked Ms. Whitman what the press release might best say about any potential buyer's responsibility regarding clean up of this horrible environmental mess we've created. As you know, we've underfunded the decommissioning fund by about half a billion dollars.
"Half a billion will be peanuts to the right buyer," Ms. Whitman assured me, as she paid an extra dollar to have the words "Fire Sale" bolded in the listing's title.
You know me. I'm not easily convinced by a dollar spent here or there, nor am I easily deflected in my dogged attempts to get hard answers even to the most difficult questions. Frankly, I knew what sorts of things my fellow employees would want to know. I also knew about the concerns the general public would have. So I emailed Ms. Whitman.
She only had a moment or so to spare when answering my email, what with her urgent need to search-engine-optimize the listing for terms like "everything must go" and "be the first on your block" and "state has new direction; we chose to go 'another way'." So I asked just a few quick questions. What changes did she anticipate an eBay buyer would implement at Vermont Yankee? Better safety monitoring? Less toxic runoff? More credible reporting? More reasonable shifts? Help for the employees' substance abuse problems? Would jobs be protected? For how long?
"Just get new stationary," she emailed me in return, "'cause if I learned one thing at eBay it's that image is eVerything."
At first I thought she was nuts. Which wasn't surprising. Hey, we're all feeling a little bonkers around here nowadays. Since the election it seems to me and my friends in the control room like the world is crashing around our ears. The river seems to whisper to us about the revenge of the fish. And we haven't even been to a picnic lately.
Like I said, I was just a hair flabbergasted that all Meg Whitman could think of to say to me in response to my politely-phrased, specific, and pressing questions was "image is eVerything." I can't tell you how long I stared at her email this morning, feeling increasingly disappointed and despairing.
But you know, Lord? The more I read her email, the more I think I got what she meant. Image just may be eVerything. I mean, sEriously.
aMen,
fAke rOb pR gUy vErmont yAnkee (and maybe someday, if I'm lucky, eBay)
As you might expect, we've been doing some pre-election planning at Vermont Yankee. We're trying to get out the vote for Brian Dubie. We want, on election day itself if necessary, to persuade anyone still on the fence about whether radiation poisoning and environmental toxicity are good or bad things to think of them as neutral, and then to concentrate on the happy benefits to me and my colleagues of imperiling the people of southeastern Vermont and neighboring Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
I couldn't sleep at all last night for all of the worrying I was doing about the election. How, I asked myself as I tossed and turned, could we at Vermont Yankee and Entergy best hide certain nuances from voters--like the fact that the habit of the NRC is to wait for definitive proof of a safety hazard before taking action--definitive proof being defined as an accident that's already happened? How could we get people to take their minds off their own petty concerns and feel sorry for J. Wayne Leonard, me, and the shareholders of Entergy?
Tick, tick, tick went my clock. Then, right around dawn, I had a moment of personal brilliance.
Our employees will work at the polls in pairs, standing always the prescribed distance away from the booths. They will open conversations with voters in as gentle, genuine, friendly, and optimistic way as possible, one that shows sensitivity to the shifting demographic in Vermont, and one that makes Brian Dubie and his friends seem oh so comme il faut.
Let me cut to the quick. Our employees will make some noise, attract some attention, and ask, "Hey, what's happening?"--only not precisely in those words.
See for yourself. Larry Smith and I will be working together in Vernon, and we've spent a few hours this morning practicing.
Posts
Gosh. I got an email today, and the subject line was "Bomb Strontium in Baby Teeth." It linked to a article here. 
J. Wayne Leonard is dumping his shares of Entergy! And it may have affected the overall value of the company. According to the website GuruFocus.com, "Chairman and CEO J Wayne Leonard sold 227,954 shares of ETR stock on 08/10/2010 at the average price of 79.11. J Wayne Leonard owns at least 360,683 shares after this. The price of the stock has decreased by 8.49% since. Other insiders have also decreased their positions in the company."
Just weeks after his most recent meeting with Hamid Karzai, president of one or another of those "stan" countries, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, one of the most successful imitators of senior commanders in the Taliban movement, has declared the cleanup of tritium at Vermont Yankee complete. 
After spending $160 million of her own fortune on a losing campaign to be the governor of California, former eBay executive Meg Whitman is hard pressed for money, and has agreed to work for commission in her attempt to sell Vermont Yankee on eBay.
