Letter: Misinformation on Vermont Yankee
To the Editor:
Defenders of Entergy’s attempts to continue operation of the controversial Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon are waging a strategic war of misinformation in order to allay Vermonters’ anger and anxiety about this obsolete plant and its irresponsible operator, sometimes at the expense of significant truths.
For example, in the Feb. 10 Sunday Valley News Perspectives section, Meredith Angwin states, relative to the leak of tritium into the ground water surrounding the aging plant, that tritium “posed no threat to public health.” This didn’t sound right, so I researched the dangers of tritium. I urge both the public and Valley News’ fact-checkers to read on their own the following website: http://ieer.org/resource/press-releases/nuclear-power-tritium-threat-to-drinking-water/. Tritium does, indeed, present a frightening and long-lasting threat to drinking water and to Connecticut River habitat.
Faced with this glaring misstatement, I re-read Angwin’s credentials in small print at the article’s end: “Meredith Angwin is a physical chemist who worked for electric utilities for more than 25 years and now heads the Energy Education Project of the Ethan Allen Institute.” The institute is a fairly transparent libertarian and pro-nuclear-power lobby, and Angwin regularly blogs as “yes vermont yankee.”
Opinion is the material of which op-ed pieces are properly made; mistruths are not.
Curt Peterson
Hartland
