The final round goes to the Governor whose letter of July 28 indicates that he knew of our issues with Mr. Luneau before re-appointing him and still stands by that appointment. I will add the letter to “comments” and urge everyone to diligently monitor Environmental Commission appointments in your own districts.

If Mr. Luneau has some science background I am unaware of that makes him particularly valuable in this capacity, I’d really like to know.

If not, it is difficult to escape the impression that he is being appointed repeatedly, despite local complaints, purely for political reasons.

______________________________________________________________

I quietly stewed over that non-response from the governor until today, when I sent yet another letter to Peter Shumlin, quoted below in “comments.”

………………………………………………………………………………………

Well, the squeaky wheel sometimes just gets put away in the closet.

I got my response from Peter Shumlin in this morning’s mail. I’ve added the text to the comments so you can judge for yourselves whether or not my concerns were addressed.

______________________________________________________________

I wrote to Governor Douglas a couple of times and, perhaps predictably, never got a response.  

I didn’t really expect that the Governor would, himself, take the time to write, but it seemed entirely reasonable to expect that someone in the office was responsible for replying to correspondence he received from the people of Vermont.  

“But that was Douglas,” I thought, confidently.  Peter Shumlin would be more engaged.

A few months ago, I got to thinking about whom the new governor might appoint to the District 6 Commission to review Act 250 applications.  On the Natural Resource Board website, the terms of the current members were posted, and two had been scheduled to expire in January of 2011.  As there was no update, I assumed no action had yet been taken and quickly sent off a concerned question about this in the “Ask the Governor” interface on his website.  In my haste, I made the erroneous assumption that this was the one-and-only way to contact the Governor electronically, because It  had been so when I attempted to e-mail Governor Douglas several years earlier.  

It was only after I hit “send” that I discovered this interface was soley for questions Governor Shumlin could answer by video, and a conventional e-mail was provided elsewhere on the site.   Nevertheless, I felt confident that whoever screens those e-mail questions would have the good sense to forward it to the appropriate reader or quickly shoot me a redirect reply.

With other fish to fry, I forgot about it for a few weeks.  Then I checked on the NRB website again and discovered that new appointments had already been made to the District 6 Commission, including the re-appointment of Dan Luneau, about whom I had specifically raised conflict of interest concerns in my e-mailed question.

Allowing the benefit of the doubt to the Governor, since I had expressed my concerns in the wrong electronic medium, I wrote the following letter and posted it by certified mail on May 31:

Dear Governor Shumlin,

It was with mixed feelings that I read the new roster for the District 6 Environmental Commission.  

While I applaud the inclusion of Julie Wolcott, whose professional credentials well-qualify her for this service, I am surprised and disappointed that Dan Luneau was reappointed as Chair.  Several weeks ago, I submitted an e-mail on the Governor’s website to express my concerns that  1) an environmental science background be represented among the three commissioners; and 2) Mr. Luneau, specifically, has family business ties that represent a conflict of interest with regard to development at Exit 20 of I-89.

The issue of Mr. Luneau’s conflict of interest has already been raised in the high-profile case of a permit issued to build a Walmart in that location.  Attorneys representing those opposed to the permit raised this concern in a timely manner before the proceedings began, but Mr. Luneau refused to recuse himself on that occasion.  

That permit is currently under appeal at the Vermont Supreme Court. Because more compelling arguments existed, the question of Mr. Luneau’s possible bias was not specifically raised in the SCOV filing.  Nevertheless, that potential conflict of interest remains a concern since Exit 20 continues to be the focus of large-scale development plans in Franklin County.

I encourage you to reconsider Mr. Luneau’s appointment, as his service in this quasi-judicial capacity will very likely lead to more challenges to Act 250 permits, engendering additional cost for all sides, including the State.

Thank your for your attention.  I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

I’m still waiting for a reply.

One would think that, before re-appointing a District Chair, especially in a development-sensitive district, the Governor would check to see if any issues had ever been raised about said appointee.

This morning, Dr. Morton Reingold, from the office of the Chief Coroner of the City of Toronto rang us up on our Pink House Studios phone.  Assuming that he was calling about a death-mask or some other forensic assistance, I immediately interrupted Mark from another call to speak with him.

Moments later, I was summoned back to the phone to help identify a piece of sculpture Dr. Reingold seemed concerned about.  It was then I learned that our friend, and Mark’s principle Toronto collector, Billy Jamieson, had passed away. Dr. Reingold wouldn’t answer our questions about the circumstances of Billy’s death but was anxious to learn something about one of Mark’s sculptures he had come across in Billy’s condo.

Now, it has to be explained that Bill Jamieson was no ordinary collector, specializing as he did in Egyptian mummies, antique shrunken heads and all sort of bizarre ethnographic art and artifacts.  His condo is literally filled with human skulls, bones and macabre ecoutrements.  With a long history of supplying the bizarre tastes of rock stars and celebrities,  his company, Jamieson Tribal Art, had recently been working on a television series for the History Channel featuring items from his collection and his adventures as a collector.  Let’s just say that he has definitely led the life-less-ordinary and leave it at that.

He has also been collecting Mark’s artwork for a number of years now, having first encountered it when he visited the Isaacs Gallery as a Toronto high school student back in 1972.  Consequently, he has some of Mark’s best known pieces like “The Incurable Romantic,”  “Armistice,” and “Thawing Out;” some of which figured in high profile censorship cases in the 1970’s.

The Coroner told us he had come across something in Billy’s house that seemed to be a male sprawled upright inside a white box with the door open.  The back of the box was signed “Mark Prent,” so he Googled that name and found the same image with contact information for Pink House Studios.  When I learned that this had something to do with Billy, I quickly recognized that Dr. Reingold was referring to “Thawing Out.”

He soberly said that he needed to know if it was a real person in that white box!  We told him it was just a sculpture made of polyester resin and fiberglass, way back in 1972.  

After a moment or two of silence, he soberly commented to Mark, “You know you are very good!”

We await further information, but are confident that Billy would have approved.

Though it may be largely symbolic in significance, it gave me no little pleasure to read that Bernie Sanders is blocking the nomination of William Ostendorff to another term on the  Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  

Completely apart from the issue of their meddling on behalf of Entergy in defiance of Vermont’s sovereignty on VY, the NRC pattern of repeatedly lowering the bar on safety standards for the benefit of plant operators is sufficient reason to block reappointment of any currently serving members.

As we listen to protestations  on the nightly news that, though threatened by flood or fire, this or that U.S. nuclear facility can’t possibly fail; how is the public expected to swallow such assurances with any confidence, given all that has been revealed in the wake of Fukushima about the questionable practices of our own nuclear regulatory agency?

It’s time for a complete scrub-down of the NRC, a whole lot of daylight, and a totally new roster of independent commissioners who will not approach the job in actuarial fashion, in service to the industry rather than to the public good.

The NRC has never met a relicensing bid they couldn’t love, and industry shills have managed to maintain protective cover over its peccadillos for ever so long; but the tide appears at last to be turning.

In the wake of an AP investigation that effectively demonstrates how weakening NRC safety standards have enabled the continued operation of failing nuclear plants, it is nice to see members of Congress finally sitting up and taking notice.

Our own Bernie Sanders is one of three senators who are pressing this issue on behalf of the American people. The other two are Barbara Boxer of California and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.  

If you wonder why more congress-folk aren’t lining up with them to storm the NRC barricades, consider how powerful the nuclear lobby…or any energy lobby…is in this country.  With 2012 shaping up to be a real bone-shaker of an election, we are unlikely to see a lot of heroics among the incumbents.

Too bad.  

It sounds as if a congressional investigation into safety standards and federal oversight at the NRC, such as Bernie and friends are calling for, could potentially bring to light evidence not only of dereliction of duty but also of criminal conspiracy.  

As I step back onto the merry-go-round following a two-week hiatus, I want to take a moment to say “good-bye” to St. Albans Zoning Administrator, Jim Tischler who is leaving after too few months in transformative service to the Rail City.

I’m not known for having fond words to say about City administrators, but Mr. Tischler has broken the mold.  

Barely two short years ago, in a moment of remarkable clarity, the City hired Jim to disentangle the rats’ nest that City zoning had become after years of mismanagement and neglect.  What they got in the bargain was a skilled visionary who would plot a course of rebirth for the troubled City through enlightened planning and responsible development.  

The new atmosphere of exploration in the City seems even more promising, as Mayor Marty Manahan will be stepping down in 2012, and popular Democrat Liz Gamache has announced her candidacy for the office.  Liz has plenty of City experience, having served in several capacities including as interim City Manager.  She is currently chairing the downtown revitalization effort and is therefore a natural to further Mr. Tischler’s ambitious agenda for civic rebirth.  Sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered!

Not surprisingly,  Mr. Tischler has now been given the opportunity to apply his planning strategies on a much grander scale, to his home state of Michigan; and it must be admitted that they need him even more than we do.

It remains to be seen whether the (few?) visionaries in City government who supported his efforts here can maintain the momentum he has created.  St. Albans’ power structure is still primarily in the heavy hands of those who have no faith that the City can be anything more than a drive-through to big-box shopping at exit 20 in the Town.  

Before departing, Mr. Tischler launched his legacy to the City with a three day public forum, “Create St. Albans” to introduce interested citizens to a fresh concept in zoning which, if adopted, will mean a new era of rational growth and civic planning.   Referred to as “Form Based” zoning, this approach has the potential to preserve what is best and most appealing about a traditional small town plan while facilitating ease of permitting for appropriate development.  The objective is to maintain public engagement in an harmonious, human-scale environment of mixed uses.

Best of luck to Jim Tischler in his Michigan endeavors; and here’s hoping his efforts in St. Albans have taken firm root, to flower in the years to come.

This week, Arnie Gundersen of Fairewwinds Associates discusses emergency planning around nuclear plants.

Experience gained from the Fukushima disaster should now inform our own emergency plans in the U.S.  At Fukushima, the U.S. and the NRC took the position that the population should be evacuated from anywhere within a 50-mile radius.  

Why is this not the plan in case of a U.S. nuclear emergency, where 10-miles remains the established perimeter?

Arnie discusses the origin in law of evacuation guidelines, which specify no perimeter but establish 25 R.E.M. as the maximum permissible dosage to which the civilian population may be exposed before they must be evacuated.  He explains how the current 10-mile evacuation radius was an assumption based entirely on untested speculation; speculation that has since been proven wholly inadequate by the volume and duration of releases at Fukushima.  

Furthermore, existing emergency evacuation plans assume no disruption in power or communication to the population, as could logically be assumed to occur with the kind of events that might trigger a nuclear accident, and with the generation failure that would accompany any nuclear accident.  They also assume that escape routes would remain uncompromised by infrastructure failures and panic, throughout the evacuation.

If, despite the overwhelming public hazard potential that has been demonstrated at Fukushima,  the Obama White House remains committed to a nuclear energy future, shouldn’t they at least demand that workable evacuation plans and safe perimeters be a part of that future?

White House & NRC Recommend 50 Mile Fukushima Evacuation, Yet Insist US Safe With Only 10 from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

I think we must take a moment to speak “Hallelujah!,” or at least “hallelujah” for a small act of humanity, not to mention common sense, on the part of Vermont’s esteemed legislators: medical marijuana is legal at last.

It couldn’t have come in a more appropriate month, as far as I am concerned.  June means Father’s Day, and my father was a glaucoma sufferer, way back in the 1960’s.

My parents had met on a train in the middle of America at the end of the Second World War.  Mother, an Army nurse, and Dad, a lowly private were already a little longer-of-tooth than most young sweethearts of the day.

From what I’ve been told, it was love at first sight.

By the time they were  mustered-out and could finally marry, having us kids became job one, as women approaching 40 and gentlemen older than that were not thought to be prime parent material.  So my sister and I arrived, just twenty-one months apart, and proceeded to keep their lives interesting through the fifties, ratcheting-things up somewhat in the turbulent sixties.  

Both bore it like troopers; but most surprising was the adaptability of my Dad, who had been raised a staunch Roman Catholic on a farm in central Illinois. Whether it was his disappointment at being unable to utilize a scholarship to teacher’s college, witnessing his family lose their farm, or surviving the Great Depression by working odd jobs for food; something set a decidedly progressive engine rumbling beneath his conservative roots.  

When I was seventeen, he began pressure drops for previously undetected glaucoma.  Despite the fact that both my Dad and my mother were working, we didn’t have a lot of money, so we went to the neighborhood dentist, the neighborhood GP, and the neighborhood eye doctor…whom we learned too late was just a trained optician with delusions of grandeur.   Once detected by a legitimate ophthalmologist,  Dad’s glaucoma didn’t respond well to drops, so surgery was required.

While he was still struggling on the drops, however, my bold big sister ventured to tell him about new evidence suggesting that marijuana could provide some relief!  Now keep in mind that this was around 1968, by which time the whole nation had taken to hyperventilating about the evils of “grass.”  Nevertheless, my straight-arrow blue-collar Dad simply thanked her for the suggestion and joked, “I think I have enough bad habits.”  

So here’s to all the glaucoma sufferers and cancer patients in Vermont who will soon be able to step up to a local dispensary in broad daylight, and legally get the simple relief that has so long been denied to them…and here’s to my darling Dad.

After six years of repeated attempts to engage the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safety,  Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates was finally given five-minutes of their precious time in a hearing that allotted a full two hours of that time to industry representatives.

Despite the brevity of his opportunity, and despite persistent interruptions, Arnie ably made the argument that, in light of recent developments at the Fukushima reactors, the NRC can no longer take the position that there is “0%” chance of containment failure at boiling water reactors in the U.S.  

In Japan the validity of that NRC position has been thoroughly tested.   Failure of the containment vessels occurred in all three reactors that were tested in the Fukushima disaster (two, in the minutes following the earthquake, before the tsunami even hit.)  As predicted by the Fukushima experience, the failure rate should now be at 100%!!

Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

This one goes under the heading “better late than never.”  Tepco is now admitting that the containment buildings may very likely be leaking.  No kidding.

____________________________________________________________

We are fortunate to have a new video analysis from Arnie Gundersen  examining the implications of the Fukushima crisis for reactors located in the U.S.;  and another excellent informational video in which our own Maggie Gundersen, president and founder of Fairewinds Associates, interviews Marco Kaltofen, of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester Mass.

Mr. Kaltofen is an expert in radiation chemistry and monitoring. He answers some of the questions Fairewinds has been receiving about the nature and pathways of radiation as it spreads, and how exposure can be minimized.

++

The Implications of the Fukushima Accident on the World’s Operating Reactors from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Where is all that Fukushima radiation going, and why does it matter? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Some key points that Arnie raises:



1) Hot water reactors such as those at Fukushima and at Vermont Yankee were not designed to have vents. The vents represent a “bandaid” that was applied later in an attempt to address original design flaws.

2)Those vent systems have been tested in the reactors three times now, courtesy of Fukushima; and three times they failed.  That is a 100% failure rate and strongly suggests those failures can happen here in the U.S. in similar reactors.

3) The NRC admits that despite their insistence that there is no chance of containment failure here in the U.S.,  they don’t have the capacity to effectively evaluate that capacity and have simply abandoned the effort to do so.

4) Failures at Fukushima 1 and the cracked fuel pool at Unit 4 were the result of the earthquake, not the tsunami.  Those systems should have been able to withstand that level of seismic activity. Similarly, in the U.S. nuclear plants are not adequately designed to withstand major seismic loads, and there is no capability to even analyze such capacity.



5) The affected area that has been assumed for emergency planning in the U.S. has now been demonstrated, also courtesy of Fukushima, to be wholly inadequate.  If an accident continues for weeks at a time as at Fukushima, a “meandering” plume of radiation will go on for many, many miles.

Current preparedness is only for a 10-mile radius, the experience at Fukushima suggests that radius should be expanded to 50 miles, which has some serious implications for major metropolises such as Chicago and New York which have huge populations in effective range of reactors that could fail.

6) Clustering nuclear reactors as at Fukushima and at some U.S. locations increases the danger from an accident because such an accident can impede operators’ ability to resolve problems arising at other units.

7)The insurance coverage employed by the industry, the Price Anderson Insurance Program is woefully inadequate.  With an event ceiling of just $10 million in coverage,  the cost of the Fukushima accident alone will come to $200 billion!!

In conclusion, says Arnie, the information coming from the industry, upon which we all have been relying, simply has not been true.

If you can still sleep after watching the first video, I strongly suggest you listen to Maggie’s interview with Mr. Kaltofen.

The Progressive Party State Committee Meeting was held Sunday at the Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans.  

It was the first PP event I have ever attended; and I approached the meeting expecting to hear a lot of focus on possible candidates and future campaigns.  The pleasant surprise was that the sixty-or-so people assembled there had good policy foremost on their minds, with politics the enabling backdrop.

Others may look forward to a diminished role for Progressives in Vermont following Peter Shumlin’s definitive victory, but this wishful thinking ignores the hard-forged nature of the party’s goals for the state.   Well-accustomed as they are to being the third party in a two-party game, if Progressives are anything, it is patient and perseverant.   These are intelligent, plain-spoken people with working-class roots and a strong sense of social justice.

Martha Abbott, who strategically withdrew from the gubernatorial race in 2010 to allow Shumlin an easier win, opened the meeting with a look back at the Progressive’s drumbeat for universal healthcare that anticipated H-202 by more than ten years!

Following Martha’s opening remarks, Progressive lawmakers reported on the success they could claim in the past legislative session, and what headway they anticipate making in the upcoming one.   Most were modest but solid achievements, maintaining essential conversations about equitable funding sources, empowering labor and closing VY; but the overarching victory was passage of H.202.  Although healthcare still hasn’t been looked at as a “system,” said Rep.Chris Pearson of Burlington, creation of  a “Green Mountain Care Board” would be an important first step. Pearson remarked on how good it felt to be part of a universe in which the Democrats were actually working for passage of H.202.

Anthony Pollina challenged the Shumlin assertion that he “didn’t raise broad based taxes,” pointing out that raising taxes on healthcare providers essentially did just that since those taxes serve to increase the cost of of already unaffordable healthcare for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay.  He also challenged the idea that a surcharge on the wealthiest Vermonters who benefit from the Bush tax cuts would drive them out of the state.  As has often been observed right here on GMD, much has been proven to put the lie to that myth.

Holding Peter Shumlin’s feet to the fire is central to the PP agenda, as he is frankly seen to be susceptible to the same kind of pragmatic policy creep that has afflicted the Obama administration.  Most think he will be a better Governor if there is a strong Progressive Party nipping at his heels; and a worse one, if that incentive ever weakens.  

The afternoon was rounded out with a brief discussion of the important role the Progressive Party is playing in tri-party redistricting efforts, and an engaging address by Martha Allen, head of the Vermont NEA.

Frankly, I was impressed.