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With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where's the mess? Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition. A single particle -- like talc, to give you some perspective -- can give you lung cancer. In the words of Helen Caldicott, M.D.: "Hypothetically, if you could take one pound of plutonium and could put a speck of it in the lungs of every human being, you would kill every man, woman, and child on earth" -- not immediately, but over time "from lung cancer," Caldicott explains.

With nuclear energy, uranium atoms split inside a reactor, and radiation heats water to its boiling point creating steam to spin a giant turbine. It all seems like ingenious, efficient, and clean energy production. So where's the mess? Now consider plutonium, a horribly carcinogenic and highly fissionable substance, radioactive for more than half a million years. If exposed to air, it will ignite. Like little pieces of confetti, very fine plutonium particles will disperse after ignition. A single particle -- like talc, to give you some perspective -- can give you lung cancer. In the words of Helen Caldicott, M.D.: "Hypothetically, if you could take one pound of plutonium and could put a speck of it in the lungs of every human being, you would kill every man, woman, and child on earth" -- not immediately, but over time "from lung cancer," Caldicott explains.

"Entergy Nuclear has hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to assist the company in its internal investigation over whether company officials lied to state regulators last year over the existence of radioactivity in buried pipes, which appear to be the source of increasing levels and types of radioactivity leaking at the Vernon reactor. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Friday that cobalt-60 and zinc-65, which are much more dangerous radioactive isotopes than tritium, have also showed up in dangerous levels in an underground trench where tritium registered up to 2 million picocuries earlier in the week. Cobalt-60 registered at 13,000 picocuries, while the federal reportable levels are 100 picocuries per liter. For zinc-65, the level was 2,460, while the reportable level is 300 picocuries per liter. For tritium, the level is 20,000 picocuries for drinking water, and 30,000 picocuries in general. The most recent test in the trench for tritium put it at 1.6 million picocuries."

A plan by the owner of Vermont Yankee and the Pilgrim Nuclear Station in Massachusetts to spin off five nuclear reactors under a new company could be in jeopardy because of Wall Street's financial crisis. Entergy Corp., which is based in New Orleans, wants to fold the plants into Enexus Energy Corp., a new company. To complete the deal, Enexus, a publicly traded Delaware holding company, must raise $4.5 billion to buy the nuclear plants in New York, Vermont, Michigan, and Massachusetts from Entergy.

BRATTLEBORO -- It's been 10 months since Environmental Court Judge Merideth Wright heard testimony related to the water temperature of the Connecticut River just below Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Did the Agency of Natural Resources err when it approved a permit allowing the heated water flowing out of the plant to raise the overall temperature of the river by 1 degree?

If no federal repository for spent nuclear fuel is opened in the next 100 years, the nation's taxpayers could be on the hook to pay for on-site storage, such as the dry casks at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. That cost could run anywhere between $10 billion and $26 billion. That was the conclusion of the Government Accounting Office, which just released a report on the costs of nuclear waste management -- whether it be a long-term repository, centralized storage or on-site storage. The United States has 70,000 tons of waste stored at 80 sites in 35 states. By 2055, the amount of waste is expected to increase to 153,000 tons. The GAO also conducted a scenario in which fuel stays on site for 500 years. It concluded the cost for that scenario could range between $34 billion to $225 billion.

If no federal repository for spent nuclear fuel is opened in the next 100 years, the nation's taxpayers could be on the hook to pay for on-site storage, such as the dry casks at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. That cost could run anywhere between $10 billion and $26 billion. That was the conclusion of the Government Accounting Office, which just released a report on the costs of nuclear waste management -- whether it be a long-term repository, centralized storage or on-site storage. The United States has 70,000 tons of waste stored at 80 sites in 35 states. By 2055, the amount of waste is expected to increase to 153,000 tons. The GAO also conducted a scenario in which fuel stays on site for 500 years. It concluded the cost for that scenario could range between $34 billion to $225 billion.

The incidence of thyroid cancer is rising at an alarming rate in Vermont, as well as across this country and especially in the Northeastern states. No cancer diagnosis is growing as fast according to the National Cancer Institute, with a growth rate of about 6 percent a year since 1997. Most newly diagnosed are women, who are two to three times more likely than men to develop thyroid cancer. Brenda Edwards is a statistician with the National Cancer Institute and reported that the annual rate increase of thyroid cancer doubled from 2 percent in the 1980s to 4.6 percent in the 1990s to 9.8 percent in 2005 for U.S males and females of all ages. That is the latest year publicly reported.

Linda Waite-Simpson, a newly elected legislator from Essex Junction, has not been sworn in, doesn't have an assigned seat in the House chamber and doesn't know what committee she'll be serving on. Waite-Simpson, a Democrat, nonetheless had her first legislative briefing Wednesday. For four hours, she and other lawmakers learned about the region's electric grid, the history of the state's only nuclear power plant and their upcoming role in deciding its future.

While problems with Vermont Yankee's cooling towers did not impact safety at the nuclear power plant in Vernon, wrote the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a letter to site vice president Ted Sullivin, the agency did fault Entergy Nuclear Operations for some of the actions it took relating to maintenance and inspection of the towers. Since August 2007, Yankee's cooling towers have suffered a series of mishaps, including the collapse of a cooling fan cell and subsequent water leaks of distribution pipes in both the east and west towers.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to deny a petition by a coalition seeking to suspend the agency's reactor license renewal process, a spokesman for the NRC said Monday. One Commissioner, Gregory Jaczko, dissented on part of the decision. The NRC limits commercial power reactor licenses to an initial 40 years but permits the licenses to be renewed for an additional 20 years. The 40-year term was based on economic and antitrust considerations - not on limitations of nuclear technology, the NRC said.

One little thing can turn into a big headache, or worse, said Jim Matteau, executive director of Windham Regional Commission. Matteau is concerned that an event that may not need to be reported according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards could cause a cascade of events requiring the notification of emergency planners and possible implementation of evacuation procedures. "We do these practices all the time and they always start with something simple," said Matteau.

Both Bill Day of Barre and Howard Fairman of Vernon, who wrote about the safety and cleanliness of nuclear power, mentioned nothing about waste - the most toxic radioactive stuff ever created - taking milleniums to store safely in their letters that appeared in the Aug. 3 edition of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.

Neither a group of environmental organizations nor a labor union have grounds to contest Entergy's plan to spin off six of its nuclear reactors into a new company, stated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a ruling issued Aug. 22. Because they have no standing, wrote the NRC, their petition to intervene in the license transfer of nuclear power plants in Vernon, Oswego and Buchanan, N.Y., Plymouth, Mass., and Covert Township, Mich., was denied.