Fed panel questions Vermont Yankee uprate proposal

By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian

posted November 17, 2005

BRATTLEBORO — Entergy has its work cut out for it. After two full days of hearings and meetings — and nearly two years after the company first filed its application for a 20 percent power increase at Vermont Yankee — a federal nuclear advisory panel expressed open dissatisfaction with some of Entergy’s responses to a wide range of technical questions, and sent top managers scurrying for better answers in time for another round of meetings at the end of the month.

“We have a basic problem here understanding what you’re doing,” Graham Wallis, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, scolded Entergy uprate project manager Craig Nichols on a question about steam flow. “It is so trivial it should be a matter of one minute to explain it.”

A subcommittee of the seven-member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) — the panel of scientists that advises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — spent more than 19 hours Tuesday and Wednesday carefully listening to Entergy’s case for the uprate, to NRC staff members’ reasons why they support it, and to a long line of area residents including farmers, doctors, and a half-dozen children, plead with them to reject the proposal they characterized as unsafe, unwanted and unnecessary.

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