The Vermont Senate has voted not to extend Vermont Yankee’s license beyond 2012, when it runs out. Free-Press story here. Two months ago, I would have bet a bazillion bucks against this happening!
Here’s the whole gallery of Free-Press coverage, if you need background.
Here’s the next-day NY Times story, which notes “Unless the chamber reverses itself, [...]

The Vermont Senate is slated to vote today (Wednesday) whether to extend the license of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant past 2012. Here’s a Free-Press story. All the recent bad news, especially the fact that the company didn’t admit to past leaks of radioactive tritirum, seem to have tilted the odds (which were once well [...]

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in and/or worried about the situation at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, where walls collapse and tritium escapes into groundwater, but the Burlington Free-Press offers a new one today: It might be harming the Vermont brand!
Cheddar cheese, maple syrup and craft beer are just a few of [...]

The  New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ Emergency  Services  Unit said Friday it will begin weekly tests of water samples along the Connecticut River, in response to the tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which is adjacent to the river. Some samples have already been collected since the plant admitted [...]

UPDATE: The Free-Press has a follow-up in Sunday’s paper (read it here) that tritium leaks are not uncommon: “At least 20 nuclear power plants around the country have reported tritium soil or water contamination, based on a Free Press examination of Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents and information gleaned from interviews with advocates and critics of [...]

A number of colleges built nuclear reactors in the ’50s and ’60s as part of their nuclear engineering programs but are closing them down. This includes Worcester Polytech, which has shut its reactor down, and UMass-Lowell, which still has its reactor. (Note: This article originally said, wrongly, that UML was also shutting.)
Among the schools with [...]

One of the many sub-debates inside the big debate about how to deal with greenhouse gas emissions concerns nuclear power: How big a part should it be of the world’s energy push?
Since it’s carbon-free and very large-scale (Seabrook can generate roughly half the total electricity output of all New Hampshire’s power plants), many people say [...]

It’s no real surprise, but this Reuters story about Seabrook Station nuclear power plant shutting down for a routine refueling notes that the owner, Florida Power and Light, plans to apply next year for a 20-year extension to Seabrook’s original 40-year operating license. Vermont Yankee, which is smaller but in worse shape than Seabrook, is [...]

An AP analysis of the finances of the companies that own nuclear reactors shows that the stock market collapse has left many of them with insufficient money to dismantle the plants when they get too old to operate.
During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because of [...]

Consultants hired by Vermont have concluded that “Vermont Yankee is reliable enough to keep running after its license expires in 2012, provided its owners make some changes, including to the plant’s condensers and the cooling towers that collapsed in 2007,” reports the Burlington Free-Press in this story.
The 35-year-old nuclear plant on the Connecticut River, not [...]

NR-1 was the Navy’s only research sub, and has done tasks like gathering bits of Space Shuttle Challenger after it was lost, exploring the USS Monitor, and doing varous seabed exploration and mapping. Among its cool attributes are extendible wheels to running on the sea floor, and a recovery claw to grab stuff.

Vermont Yankee isn’t particularly big as nuclear power plants go - 650 megawatt maximum output, or a little more than half the size of Seabrook - but it still produces about half the electricity that Vermont uses. That has made its continuing travails with collapsing water towers and suspect piping big news in that state, [...]

This quickie Globe story says a study from a consulting firm (which doesn’t seem to have it on their Web site, alas) says Massachusetts “has the potential to turn (wind, solar, geo, biofuel) into a combined 10 million megawatt hours of power annually by 2020″ and so meet a standard that 15 percent of the [...]