This is a letter that I wrote to the editor of the St. Albans Messenger to respond to the pleas of workers at the Vernon, Vermont nuclear power plant that their jobs be saved. It has been amended to read more specifically and emphatically.
On the subject of the Nuclear Plant in Vernon, Vermont
There has recently been a spate of letters to the editor of this paper written by employees of Entergy‛s nuclear electricity generating plant in Vernon. It is obvious to me that the Entergy Corporation has a public relations campaign involved in having its workers write letters to save their jobs.
The readers of this paper need some perspective on this subject.
I first assembled a nuclear reactor in 1958, nine months after I graduated from Columbia University. This was about four years after the first reactor to produce nuclear power became operational. At the time, there were two designs by Westinghouse and one design by General Electric in operation. That first reactor I assembled was a prototype of General Electric‛s second design.
Russ Medbery, the West Milton, NY, site construction manager for the project called Jim Day and I into his office. He said he had chosen the two of us to assemble the reactor. After handing us the drawings of the reactor, he said that if we needed any help, we should contact him. No procedures had been written for that reactor. We wrote them. We talked with the designers. We visited the manufacturers of the control drives. We handled the fuel.
Instead of sealing the reactor before filling it with the moderating water, we lowered the fuel into the water while the physicist that designed the reactor core monitored its reactivity. Admiral Richover interviewed me, standing on top of the reactor, while we were inserting a fuel element. The tradespeople I was direct were nervous about what was happening under their feet. The semester course in reactor engineering that I had passed at Columbia let me understand the inverse reactivity chart he was plotting. If one divided by the reactivity he was measuring reached zero, BOOM! You would not be reading this. Instead, I was able to reassure the workers that they were safe.
Following that assembly, I assembled two more reactors of that design in a submarine and tested the two of them, operating together. I then assembled three submarine reactors of Westinghouse‛s third design and one reactor of Combustion Engineering design. There was a twelve month period in which I assembled four reactors. I trained a Rolls Royce engineer who returned to England to direct the assembly of that nation‛s first submarine reactor. Later, I was senior Refueling Reactor for a reactor of Westinghouse‛s second design. I trained members of the English Admiralty and the contracted engineers in reactor refueling techniques.
Westinghouse leased my services from the Electric Boat Corporation to disassemble a steam generator removed from the reactor plant of the prototype reactor for the USS Nautilus. It was the first reactor to produce useable power. The location was also downwind from nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. That testing sometimes resulted in five milli-Roentgen per hour background levels all over Idaho. Where I worked was also over-the-horizon from an experimental nuclear airplane engine. The catch phase among nuclear workers was: “Not over my house.” Down the road from where I worked was an underground plant that dissolved spent reactor fuel to recover useable isotopes from the fission products. I have watched work being done with spent fuel assemblies not more than ten feet away from me, through a leaded glass window.
The steam generator disassembly work was performed in a spent fuel facility. I was able to enter the pool rooms, turn off the lights and witness the Cerenkov radiation from the fuel. Cerenkov radiation around the radioactive fuel emits blue light. The disassembly involved work in eight Roentgen per hour radiations fields. Since it was my engineering practice to never ask a workman to perform work that I would not do and to do the work myself if I could do it faster and receive less radiation than he would, I installed plastic plugs in the steam generator tubes myself. A film badge and dosimeter recorders on my right wrist received one Roentgen. My whole body exposure was within limits.
Nuclear power can be worked with. I am almost seventy-nine and have voluntarily done far more damage to my bodily health than radiation did. When Westinghouse and General Electric began marketing their nuclear skills to the power generation industry as a turn-key operation, around 1963 or 1964, I was appalled. Nuclear reactors are horribly dangerous. They are not automobiles that you can safely run after being handed the key. Unfortunately, business people love risk, especially when they live far from it and it makes money. All things are less important to them than money, including other people.
In my opinion, it is absolutely unforgivable to operate a nuclear plant with a pipe that you do not know is there, that you cannot explain. If radioactive fluid is entering a pipe, there is at least one end to the pipe that someone should have asked about. It is totally, absolutely irresponsible to build a nuclear plant, much less five of them, where it is known that a tectonic plate is converging in order past under another tectonic plate, as at Fukushima, Japan. It is even more irresponsible, if that is possible, to ignore stone markers in the hills that designate the extreme heights reached by tsunamis from past tectonic slippages, as was done at Fukushima.
That brings us back to the Windsor, Vermont plant. I have always believed that the people responsible for a nuclear reactor should live with the beast as do the submariners that live underwater in a metal tube with a reactor, at nearly inconceivable water pressure. I have worked with people who died when their submarine sank. I have listened to the transmissions between a tender and a sinking submarine. For the love of money, bean counters and businessmen will take all kinds of risks with other peoples lives.
Allowed to, Entergy would operate the Vernon plan until it fails financially. They will then declare bankruptcy and leave the mess to someone else, if they can. You can be certain that the cost to clean up the mess is more than they plan to spend.
In conclusion, I am truly sorry that the workers at the Vernon Plant will lose their jobs if the plant closes. Believe me when I say that I hope you will find work at an adequate wage, even if less than you make today. I did not knowingly take chances that I could avoid when working with reactors. One worker who gave me excuses for why he could not perform his job was off the job, regardless of the consequences to his personal life. My wife, child and I lived closer to the reactor than his wife, children and he did. If the workers pleading for their jobs at the Vernon plant must be sacrificed for the safety of the rest of us, so be it. I would rather that you lose your job than live with a reactor managed by an absentee corporation that cares only for money.
Witchcat