Yankee Doodle Dandy?

A few days before the Japanese earthquake (and ensuing nuclear power and human crisis), the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in this country approved Vermont Yankee’s request for a new 20-year license.

Despite the local plant’s questionable history (radioactive hydrogen was found leaking into local water supplies in 2010), and political opposition to the renewal of the plant’s permit for public good (the state senate in Montpelier voted last year to decommission the plant), the NRC saw no real reason to halt operation of the plant that supplies approximately 40 percent of the state’s power.

Now, in the wake of the Japanese disaster and realizations that Vermont Yankee possesses the same design as the crippled Japanese reactors, the NRC is including Yankee in a federal review of nuclear power plants, though they are not expected to renege on their prior commitment to recommission the plant.

For me, this reeks of wasted opportunity. While I don’t think that fear of meltdown should be the number one concern associated with nuclear power (economic concerns rank far higher on my list), if there has ever been a moment worth seizing to move beyond nuclear power, it is this one.

There were fourteen “near-misses” at U.S nuclear power plants last year alone (defined as: “troubling events, safety equipment problems and security shortcomings”). And while that’s the kind of news that is usually banished to the inner obscurity of the newspaper, it’s front-page news in the wake of Japan.

We need a new model for energy production in this country. Crumbling nuclear power plants are no more the answer than global warming coal plants or oil that does everything from undermine progressive efforts in the Middle East to poison First Nations communities in Canada (Canada is the #1 exporter of oil to the United States).

Time and time again we have failed to seize opportunities at profound, nation-wide change. Last Earth Day, as oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico destroying local human and natural environments, instead of focusing our attention on reducing both foreign and domestic oil consumption, we vilified BP and called it a day. Instead of undertaking initiatives to bring electric and natural gas vehicles to the roads, and to improve access to and the efficiency of public transportation systems, we treated the event as an isolated one and moved on.

This is our chance to take a good hard look at how we generate electricity in this country and make some sweeping changes.

I’m not saying we should shut down every one of the 104 currently operating reactors and replace them with some utopic landscape covered in solar panels and wind turbines.

But we could make the collective recognition that some of our current methods of energy generation pose serious threats to human health and welfare right here in Vermont and all around the world, and undertake the appropriate infrastructural changes.

Public momentum is a hard thing to capture; for all I know, the eye of the public has already moved on, and yet again, we’ve missed our chance to dream big and live better.