Entergy and their buddy, Gov. Douglas, would love you to think that there are no problems at Vermont Yankee and we can happily go forward without too many worries. We haven't seen it quite the same way here at GMD. In fact, if you search our archives for “Yankee” and “leak” you'll find over 200 entries, and I don't think any of them refer to George Steinbrenner's highest paid employees.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, who has served on the oversight panel looking into Vermont Yankee's operations, has an op-ed piece in the Free Press today that explores and summarizes the panel's findings and recommendations. Guess what: it's not the clean bill of health that you might have heard.

Here are a couple of highlights, but you'll want to follow the link to read the whole thing.

And as you think of our future with Vermont Yankee continuing to run, and with the 60-year cool-down period vouchsafed to VY by Douglas, you might want to ask yourself, “Do you feel lucky today?”

The VYOP uncovered serious and system-wide problems. We concluded that VY has both mechanical and cultural problems that Entergy must address before any license extension to 2032. Entergy's deferred maintenance of VY's mechanical components is troubling and expensive to fix.

More important than mechanical component failures are the serious systemic cultural problems the VYOP uncovered. Historically, VY has been a very reliable plant, but we found that it is now considered among the 25 percent worst nuclear plants in the United States according to the “Equipment Reliability Index.”