Howard Shaffer came out with another of his dewey-eyed defenses of Vermont Yankee a few days ago in a letter to the editor. We know the line of patter practically by heart now: “…safe…clean…cheap…blah-blah-blah.”

The trouble is, the same people who read his op-ed very likely  also read the May 24th Free Press, which contained a hair-raising account of the struggle in Japan to contain the radiation at Fukushima and to keep the crippled reactors cool…(you know, so as to avoid a meltdown?)…as well as news of efforts to pressure the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to finally deliver on its 30 year promise to do something about nuclear waste storage.

And there has been no shortage of bad news from failures at aging reactors all over the country this year.

Taken altogether, it doesn’t add up to a safe or clean picture of nuclear energy; and cheap, we have learned, it is not.  Even Wall Street is abandoning ship on nuclear investment.

Meanwhile, Fairewinds Associates has a very compelling new video uploaded on their site, featuring Margaret Harrington in conversation with Arnie Gundersen and two Japanese women, journalist Chihio Kaneka and Fukushima resident Chikako Nishiyama, who share first-hand experiences of the aftermath of the 2011 disaster there.  

Through Ms. Kaneka, who acts as her interpreter, Ms. Nishiyama,  a Kawauchi city councilwoman, describes how due to a misunderstanding of  the way radiation plumes distribute themselves, the people of her village were told to evacuate to another location which was actually significantly more exposed to radiation than was the village they left behind.  

From the two women’s account, we get a sense of the chaos and misinformation that further  complicated an already very dangerous situation.

Moving forward to the present and the ongoing effort to simply contain the simmering stew of Fukushima, it is apparently becoming more and more difficult to staff the endless shifts of workers extending far into the forseeable future because exposure levels are rising too quickly.  It sounds like no one really knows  what the endgame will be, because it is just barely possible to keep a lid on crisis as things now stand.

It is remarkable to me that this situation gets so little rise from the public at large.  

The worldwide industry is  adept at message control and has such a long and uniquely intimate history with government “regulators;”  and none of us ever wants to believe the worst will happen to us; so we buy the pretty talk from people like Howard Shaffer,  we trust officials to protect us, and we make ourselves satisfied with half-truths and half-answers to difficult questions.

One of Mr. Shaffer’s principle arguments for the economic value of VY, is that 75% of energy generated in Vermont comes from Vermont Yankee.  Of course he neatly avoids discussing the fact that Vermont currently buys none of its power from the aging facility.  So its economic value to Vermont is highly questionable, especially since there is a growing sense that Entergy cannot make good on its decommissioning commitments when the time comes; and we will most likely be facing a cost for clean-up that will cancel out any cost benefit the state has enjoyed from the heavily subsidized location of VY on our soil.

Mr. Shaffer’s valentines to VY only serve to remind us that a festering carbuncle continues to lodge on Vermont’s border, from which we derive little benefit but must tolerate considerable risk.  

From Ms. Nishiyama and Ms. Kaneka we get a better idea of just what the “worst case” scenario might look like.