Power politics

From the Boston Globe:

On February 24, Randy Brock, a Republican state senator in Vermont, did something he never expected to do. He voted to close Vermont Yankee, the state’s only nuclear power plant. A longtime supporter of the plant, Brock did not want to vote this way. He considers nuclear power safe, environmentally friendly, and reliable and wants the plant to stay open. But a series of problems at Vermont Yankee forced his hand. “If their board of directors and its management had been thoroughly infiltrated by anti-nuclear activists,” he says, “they could not have done a better job destroying their own case.” Vermonters – including the senator – were fed up with the way the plant was being run, so he voted no.

The Vermont vote, coming just a week after President Barack Obama announced $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees for companies building two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, would seem to show a New England stuck in the no-nukes 1980s, out of step with the nuclear fever sweeping the rest of the country. In March, Gallup reported that support for nuclear power as “one of the ways to provide electricity” had climbed to a new high of 62 percent. In the same poll, 28 percent of Americans said they “strongly favor” nuclear power, the highest Gallup has measured since it first asked the question in 1994.

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