Uncertainty grows on Vermont Yankee future

MONTPELIER, Vt. - Uncertainty continues to be the watchword on the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's future as lawmakers prepare to vote — or not — in their upcoming session on whether the plant should operate after its current license expires in 2012.

Vermont's is the only Legislature in the country that has given itself the authority to second-guess a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission decision on whether a nuclear plant should get a license extension. The NRC has approved 55 such extensions at reactors around the country and denied none.

Leaders of the Democrat-controlled Vermont House and Senate had set a Nov. 1 deadline for Vermont Yankee's owner, New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., to strike a deal with Vermont's retail utilities on how much power from the plant would cost post-2012. They said they wanted time to analyze the deal before lawmakers return in January for a session that typically lasts until May.

But the Nov. 1 deadline has passed, and participants in talks this week were offering no estimate of when they might conclude.

"It makes it very difficult to have a vote in the upcoming session," House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morristown, said Wednesday. "Clearly the issue of what the purchase power price will be is critical to the decision about continued operation."

Rep. Tony Klein, Smith's chief lieutenant on energy issues as chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, took a different view. He noted his panel is to hold hearings in December on what New England's power market might offer as alternatives to Vermont Yankee, and on a plan by Entergy to spin off the Vernon reactor and five others into a newly created company.

"I think by the very fact that we're still willing to be gathering information in December by holding a hearing before the session, we are preparing for the possibility that we could still have a vote if the information we are missing comes forward before the session starts," said Klein, an East Montpelier Democrat.

One thing that is becoming clearer is how the Legislature actually will go about deciding the issue.

Stephen Wark, deputy commissioner of the state Public Service Department, which represents consumers in utility rate cases, said legal analysts have agreed that the way state law on the issue is currently written, lawmakers will need to pass a bill, and the governor will need to sign it, for Vermont Yankee to continue operating after 2012. Inaction would deny the plant the needed approval for continued operation, and a resolution would not settle the question, he said.

But he also noted that the 2006 legislation in which lawmakers most recently gave themselves the authority to vote up or down on relicensing could always be changed by the 2010 Legislature.

Whatever it does, Wark said his department and Gov. Jim Douglas hope the Legislature will decide the issue in 2010. If a 2012 shutdown is ordered, the state and its utilities need to plan for how to meet the one-third of the state's power demand currently met by the reactor in Vermont's southeast corner.

"And the employees at Vermont Yankee need to know if they're going to have to look for a job," Wark said.

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