Southern Vermont Digest, Monday, July 14, 2003

July 13, 2003

Yankee ordered to give more info

The Associated Press

BRATTLEBORO — The Public Service Board has ordered officials at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to provide more information to an anti-nuclear group.

Hearing Officer David Farnsworth said Thursday that Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee officials had not complied with a board order and called for them to make better sense of the information they had provided.

“Given the volume of documentation provided both electronically and in hard copy, Entergy should have made a greater effort to organize the information in a manner that would make it more readily accessible,” Farnsworth wrote in his recommendation that was adopted by the board.

Farnsworth was called in on Wednesday after members of the New England Coalition said the plant’s offerings consisted largely of hundreds of untitled, randomly arranged documents, some of which had hundreds of pages missing or deleted.

Farnsworth asked plant officials to arrange indexes and tables of content for the documents as well as identifying authors and giving other pertinent information related to the documents.

New England Coalition staffer Ray Shadis hailed the order as a major victory for those seeking more information about the plant’s proposed power increase.

“Active citizens can now get ahold of this information,” Shadis said.