On August 27, Entergy announced that it plans to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in the fall of 2014, when the plant's current fuel is depleted. Entergy plans to decommission the plant using the SAFSTOR option, which consists of defueling, mothballing the plant for a period, then dismantling it by the end of 60 years. Entergy said that it is closing the plant because it is no longer projected to make money, considering the estimated future natural gas prices. Electric power generated by gas is now over 50 percent of the ISO-New England grid.

City people sometimes move to a farming community and then are somewhat shocked that the beautiful fields are actually not just for looking at and painting. A farmer's fields are a sort of factory. The fields produce stuff. They take inputs of raw materials, such as seeds, fertilizer, water, pesticides, and so forth. With these inputs, they produce food. Some farms are organic, and they use non-chemical fertilizer and more "natural" methods of pest control, but the goal is the same. A farmer's fields are supposed to produce food. That's the goal of farming.

The news has finally come out on a long-awaited subject: the first determination by Japan's new Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) that a nuclear plant in Japan lies on a seismic fault determined to be active.

The May 2013 edition of the technical journal Nuclear Technology (NT) is available electronically and in hard copy for American Nuclear Society member subscribers and others.

Refueling optimism

In Vermont, the Holiday Season did not slow the wave of actions and interest about energy in general and the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in particular. Vermont Yankee continues to run very well, and there have not been even any routine events for opponents to "crow" about.

The woman on the moral high ground

The nuclear energy industry is the only large-scale energy producer responsible for managing and storing (and paying for) all the wastes generated by the process [in contrast to, for example... dumping wastes into the atmosphere].

How to avoid information overload on the Internet

The December 2012 issue of ANS's Nuclear Technology journal is available electronically and in hard copy for American Nuclear Society member subscribers and others. Non-subscribers click here to  subscribe to NT and other ANS titles.