Brattleboro, Vermont
THE MEETING would be starting at 6:00 p.m. in Brattleboro, and I would have to drive across the state to get there. The event would last at least three hours, probably longer, so I might not get home much before midnight. And, then, the Red Sox and Yankees were playing at Fenway. Staying home seemed like a far more attractive prospect than sitting in the bleachers at a high school gym and listening to my fellow Vermonters talk about a subject they have been wearing out for more than 30 years now–nuclear power.
But I decided to go because, lately, the issue of nuclear power has come into play. Articles in Wired and Forbes have made the pro-nuclear case, and then, in a sure sign that the old attitudes were changing, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had written a pro-nuke piece a few days earlier. The new, trendy case for nuclear power is that it makes electricity without putting carbon into the air. If you believe that greenhouse gases are a cause of global warming and that this increase in the world’s temperature will have catastrophic effects, then nukes look pretty good. Global warming is the hip, new crisis; Three Mile Island is so last century.
The anti-nuclear people, then, are losing ground and have become the reactionaries in a fight where they believe they are on the side of the future. In Vermont these people call themselves progressives, and the state’s lone congressman, Bernie Sanders, is typical of the breed. Clinging with a death grip to the certainties of the ’60s, they can be self-righteous, sanctimonious, utterly humorless, and incapable of civility when dealing with political opponents. (They also make good ice cream.) If you live in Vermont and don’t share their faith, you can get pretty tired, pretty quickly of their didacticism. So I was looking forward, maliciously, to seeing them struggle with their new status.
When I got on the highway, I turned on the radio to Sean Hannity and Charles Rangel shouting at each other. The issue, it seemed, was Social Security reform. Rangel thought President Bush should be impeached and Hannity thought Rangel should apologize for saying so. It became less edifying after that. So I went with a tape of oldies, instead, and listened to Chuck Berry through a series of quaint little postcard towns, each with its village green, country store, and austere church steeple.
I wasn’t sure of my directions but I knew I had the right place when I saw the rusting pickup with a hand-painted plywood sign in the bed. Veterans Against Nuclear Poison. Shaping up, I thought, to be that kind of night.
Banners on the walls of the gym commemorated various state championships in football, basketball, track, and skiing. Folding metal chairs had been arranged in rows from goal to goal and the bleachers had been pulled out to accommodate what looked to be about 600 people. Cultural profiling was no problem. The people with the pony tails were the anti-nukes.
The specific issue under consideration was “dry cask” storage at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant a few miles south of the high school. The plant has been storing spent fuel in a seven-story pool of water since it began operating some 32 years ago on ground that had previously been a dairy farm. The pool was never meant for permanent storage. According to the original vision, most nuclear waste would be reprocessed and the rest would be stored safely somewhere else by the federal government.
Well, the federals changed their minds about reprocessing. Too much risk that some of the fissionable material that is a byproduct of the process would wind up in the wrong hands. (Europeans countries, among others, continue to reprocess.) And, after a couple of decades of research and millions of dollars in construction, a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is still empty.
Nevada doesn’t want the stuff and says putting it in Yucca Mountain is an unacceptable risk. Never mind that everyone from the NRC to the EPA has said the site is safe. The attitude is simply–Not In My Backyard. Or, in this case, Not In My New Backyard. Clark County is the fastest-growing county in the nation and it is, basically, Las Vegas. But a city built on chance doesn’t want to take any chances with nuclear waste. Among the objections to Yucca Mountain is that there is no way of knowing if it will still be stable and safe 100,000 years from now. Anyone accustomed to the odds in a casino ought to be able to live with that kind of uncertainty.
But . . . the new Nevadans don’t want the radioactive waste near their new homes. Never mind that the stuff was made in plants that provided electricity to their old homes (or that Las Vegas uses electricity more profligately than any city in the world). In America, you get to pack up and leave the old life behind, especially if you are moving to Vegas. The spent fuel is part of your former existence–like the bad debts and discarded spouse. On their side, the Nevadans have the new minority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, making sure the honeycomb of tunnels under Yucca Mountain will remain vacant at least until the spent fuel pool at Vermont Yankee fills up in 2007 or 2008, and maybe longer.
So, because the feds welched on their end of the deal, Vermont Yankee became a nuclear waste storage facility–or dump, depending on your point of view. This presents an opportunity for people who never wanted the plant in the first place. Their solution? Deny a permit to store spent fuel in dry casks, close the plant down, and go to “clean, renewable energy.”
The meeting at Brattleboro gave them a chance to make this case in front of a small group of legislators who had come down from Montpelier, the capital, to listen. One of the first to make the case, read an account of the lives of the first Vermonters. They shared the place, it seems, with mastodons.
And your point is? I found myself thinking.
“That was 12,000 years ago,” the man said, and his point became plain enough. “Twelve thousand years is one-half the half-life of nuclear waste.”
Several engineers made the case for dry cask storage, and they were persuasive. “I’ve worked with reactors in the Navy,” one of them said, calmly, “and I’ve been in the nuclear industry since I left the service. I’ve worked around dry cask storage containers. It is a safe, passive system that does not rely on electricity, pumps, or heat exchangers. The alternative to storing waste this way is to generate electricity by methods that will produce a different kind of waste and put it into the atmosphere. Millions of tons of it.”
The arguments were familiar. Some people stated them more artfully than others. One man talked about “glow-in-the-dark maple syrup,” and another raised the specter of terrorism. “There is a bullseye on that plant,” he said.
An attractive blonde woman called herself an “advocate for the climate,” and made the case for nuclear power as an answer to global warming, “potentially the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the world.”
Nuclear power, a later speaker agreed, was the alternative to “massive die-offs due to global warming.”
This is a big theme among newer advocates of nuclear power, and you heard it, over and over, along with the more usual economic arguments. You also heard about the dangers of nuclear waste, the desirability of alternative, renewable energy, and the low cunning of the plant’s owners (“an out-of-state corporation”).
Like most people in the room, I suspect, I wasn’t swayed by any of these arguments. I favored the dry cask storage plan specifically, and nuclear power in general, before I went into the gym and I still favored them, almost four hours later, when I left. But, unexpectedly, I felt more and more charitable as the night wore on.
The state of Vermont had been handed a problem by other, grander people down in Washington. As an exhibition of the way they did business down there, you had the Senate hearings on John Bolton’s fitness to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Those proceedings did not exhibit a small fraction of the thoughtfulness and civility I saw in the Brattleboro high school gym where, among others, a former governor of Vermont waited three hours for his opportunity to speak for three minutes (pro nuke). He packed more eloquence into those three minutes than Joseph Biden has managed in a lifetime.
If the meeting didn’t change minds, it clarified thinking in an atmosphere of civility and seriousness, and that is worth a Red Sox game every time.
When I was back on the road, I turned the radio on and got Bill O’Reilly haranguing some poor civilian in his accustomed fashion. I gave him three minutes then went back to Chuck Berry.
Geoffrey Norman is a writer in Vermont.
