PUTNEY, Vt. (AP) – Her bearing erect, her diction flawless, her arguments honed by decades of practice, Diana Sidebotham would be a tough foe in any debate.
And she hasn’t been shy about bringing it on.
A founder of the anti-nuclear New England Coalition citizens group, Sidebotham, 74, has been a thorn in the side of Vermont Yankee nuclear plant “since it was a hole in the ground,” she said.
Victory – a permanent shutdown at Vermont Yankee – has been elusive. The 34-year-old plant recently won permission to boost its power output by 20 percent and appears poised to get the OK to stay open past the scheduled 2012 expiration of its existing license.
But Sidebotham said she’ll stay on the plant’s case as long as she can.
“I don’t discourage easily,” she said. “The issue is so important, it must be pursued.”
It’s been pursued, all right: Since opening in 1972, Vermont Yankee has been a lightning rod for anti-nuclear protesters. They’ve chained themselves to its fences, staged die-ins outside and blocked entrances to the plant, which is located in the southeastern Vermont town of Vernon.
On Oct. 16, 26 people were arrested outside the Brattleboro offices of owner Entergy Nuclear in the latest demonstration, which drew about 200 people.
The duration of the movement has been remarkable for its consistency, according to Richard Sedano, a former Vermont utility regulator who now works with an international consulting group.
Other plants around the country see bursts of activism come and go, but they are smaller and less consistent, he said.
“I don’t know if on a routine basis, issues relating to the nuclear power plant in a locality can regularly bring out the general public interest quite as consistently as Vermont Yankee has always seemed able to do,” Sedano said.
David Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety program with the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said the plant critics’ persistence is something of a Yankee tradition.
“Plants in New England tend to have a higher level of citizen engagement than plants elsewhere,” he said. “I’m not sure Vermont Yankee has more (activism) than plants in its general area” of the Northeast. “But all those plants have more (public engagement) than plants in Kansas or the Southeast.”
The movement’s tenacity is also somewhat at odds with the generally clean history of the 650-megawatt plant, which has one of the top performance records in the U.S. nuclear industry, according to regulators.
But they, too, have kept close tabs on it.
A judicial arm of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month agreed to hear five “contentions” – or formal criticisms – of Vermont Yankee’s request for a 20-year license extension, one from the state of Vermont and four from Sidebotham’s group.
That’s more than have been heard on any other of the 54 U.S. reactors whose owners have sought to run beyond their scheduled shutdown dates, said NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci.
Two years ago, Vermont Yankee became the first plant in the country to be subjected to a new and more in-depth review of its operations as part of regulators’ evaluation of its request to boost its power output by 20 percent.
But critics like Frances Crowe keep after it, calling for a shutdown.
Crowe, 87, of Northampton, Mass., was arrested at Vermont Yankee last year after she and other protesters put effigies of themselves outside the plant gate and then marched on the corporate offices of Entergy Nuclear.
Crowe, whose anti-nuke activism dates to the 1950s, lives about 40 minutes away from the plant.
Her late husband was a radiologist who had a keen professional interest in the effects of radiation.
“What keeps me at it? It’s there. It doesn’t go away, so that’s what we need to do,” Crowe said.
Rob Williams, spokesman for Vermont Yankee owner Entergy, said he had seen an uptick in anti-nuclear activism in recent years in part because the plant has been busy with new projects.
Formerly owned by a group of New England utilities, Vermont Yankee was sold to Entergy in 2002. Following that came the plant’s request to increase power, a move to address a spent fuel pool running out of room by installing new concrete-and-steel “dry casks” to store radioactive waste and now the request for the license extension.
“In just four years we’ve undertaken four major initiatives,” Williams said. “Interest in the sale readily transferred to interest in each of the subsequent initiatives – all of that in a regulatory process that is very open and very fair and that certainly generated a lot of healthy discussion.”
Sedano says all the criticism is healthy. State officials have “felt very strongly that these are important safety issues and that it’s important to ask a lot of questions.”
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On the Net:
Vermont Yankee: www.vermontyankee.com
New England Coalition: www.necnp.org
AP-ES-10-28-06 1454EDT
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