The Vermont legislature hasn’t ended our growing national obsession with nuclear power, but it may toss some sand in the engine.
Consider this story in The New York Times:
In an unusual state foray into nuclear regulation, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 Wednesday to block operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant after 2012, citing radioactive leaks, misstatements in testimony by plant officials and other problems.
Unless the chamber reverses itself, it will be the first time in more than 20 years that the public or its representatives has decided to close a reactor.
The vote came just more than a week after President Obama declared a new era of rebirth for the nation’s nuclear industry, announcing federal loan guarantees of $8.3 billion to assure the construction of a twin-reactor plant near Augusta, Ga.
While it is unclear how Vermont Yankee’s fate could influence the future of nuclear power nationally, the reactor’s recent troubles are viewed by some as a challenge to arguments that such plants are clean, well run and worth building.
The Vermont decision is unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere because of the specifics of this situation — as the Times points out, Vermont had power at the state level to deal with the plant because of some unusual circumstances — but it offers a more blemished view, if you will, of the nuclear industry than what we have been getting lately.
Nuke plants are not the sleek and clean providers of power that the industry wants us to believe they are. There are security issues, waste disposal issues and the reality that should a plant fail the consequences will be massive. And the Vermont plant, with its slew of troubles, should remind us of this.
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Hank Kalet 
There's nothing clean about the mining and processing of uranium.We never hear about the accidents unless they rise to the level of Three Mile Island.Many of the aging nuclear plants are leaking radioactive liquids into the ground water and rivers. We are told, not to worry, there's no more radiation than an x-ray. Yeah right.The NJ nuclear plants are storing the nuclear waste on site and many experts feel that this poses a potential juicy target for terrorists not to mention the hazard of densely packed spent fuel rods being stored in pools on site.From the 2003 Princeton study on spent power-reactor fuel:\”Because of the unavailability of off-site storage for spent power-reactor fuel, the NRChas allowed high-density storage of spent fuel in pools originally designed to hold muchsmaller inventories. As a result, virtually all U.S. spent-fuel pools have been re-rackedto hold spent-fuel assemblies at densities that approach those in reactor cores. In orderto prevent the spent fuel from going critical, the fuel assemblies are partitioned off fromeach other in metal boxes whose walls contain neutron-absorbing boron. It has beenknown for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convectiveair cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuelrecently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures atwhich the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission products, including 30-year half-life 137Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to olderspent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could besignificantly worse than those from Chernobyl.\”http://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/11_1Alvarez.pdf