Entergy has won a preliminary injunction against the state of Vermont to keep the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant open beyond March of this year. U.S. District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha handed down the decision this afternoon, ruling that the federal Atomic Energy Act preempts state law.

Staff writer Andy Bromage will have more on this story later this evening.

Click here to view the full 102-page ruling.

Here’s Gov. Peter Shumlin’s statement on the decision:

“I am very disappointed in today’s ruling from the federal court. Entergy has not been a trustworthy partner with the state of Vermont. Vermont Yankee needed legislative approval 40 years ago. The plant received approval to operate until March, 2012. I continue to believe that it is in Vermont’s best interest to retire the plant. I will await the Attorney General’s review of the decision to comment further on whether the state will appeal.”

This article appears in The Health & Fitness Issue 2012.

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Tyler Machado was the digital media manager at Seven Days. He mostly worked behind the scenes making sure the website, email newsletters and social media feeds stayed in tip-top shape.

7 replies on “Judge Rules in Favor of Entergy in Vermont Yankee Case; Plant May Operate Beyond 2012”

  3. Thank god we have independent federal judges (and this one was nominated by Leahy and appointed by Clinton).  A judge who made a legal decision (gasp!), not a political one.  A judge who is willing to uphold the rule of law.  A judge who was willing to unmask the game that Vermont’s legislative leaders and aspiring governor made of taking a legislative vote on safety that they knew the law prohibited them from doing and poorly disguising it as a vote for “reliability.”   A judge who won’t go along with the “ends justifies the means” mentality of Vermont’s political leaders in their zeal to shut down a business for purely political reasons. For the record, Greenberg has issued innumerable, lengthy essays on this and other blogs declaring that the judge would never — couldn’t possibly ever — issue exactly this decision.  He wouldn’t settle for just saying that the decision could go either way and that he hoped VY lost.  No.  He insisted that the law professors at VLS and everyone else were all wrong and that no judge could ever ever ever buy VY’s arguments in this case.  Stannard also has repeatedly harshly ridiculed VY’s argument that last year’s vote was about safety.  Guess what?  It was about safety.  VY was right, and the judge was willing to speak the truth and not go along with the wink-wink game that was being played here. Don’t like federal law?  Change it.  Don’t break it and hope the court will play along.

  4. I will have a good deal more to say about this decision in due time.  But since my name has been brought into this twice here, suffice it to say that I believe that the judge has misconstrued both the facts and the law of this case. 

    In particular, the judge’s theory that Vermont was motivated by safety considerations fails to explain how numerous legislators and a governor clearly on record as believing that Vermont Yankee is “clean, safe, and reliable” voted for the laws the judge is now casting aside, rather than blowing the whistle on a grand conspiracy to hide the true motivation of the laws.  Act 160, in particular, passed unanimously and was signed by Governor Douglas.

    The theory also fails to explain why, if the motivation were safety back in 2005, Vermont did not choose the easiest, quickest course: namely, doing nothing.  Had Act 74 not passed, Vermont Yankee’s spent fuel pool would have been filled with a few years, and the plant would have been forced to close.  Which is precisely why Entergy VP Jay Thayer greeted its passage with an email whose subject line was “GOOD NEWS!”  Suffice it to say that the judge’s rendition of the history in the first 1/2 of his decision constitutes a VERY slanted, highly selective view of events, which is impossible to reconcile with the full record.

    As a matter of law, it will be difficult to reconcile the Judge’s interpretation of the PG&E precedent with any realistic version of the dual regulatory scheme which everyone, including the Judge himself, admits was the intention of Congress.  By declaring any legislative activity which even mentions the word “safety” to be an incursion into the federally  preempted field, the Judge makes ECONOMIC cost-benefit analysis impossible. And by failing to consider that Vermont legislators and other officials have responsibilities beyond legislation, INCLUDING clearly permissible intervention in federal nuclear safety dockets, the Judge’s recitation of all of the instances of discussion of “safety” rings hollow.

    All that said, before others say it, I will.  Judge Murtha is both a lawyer and a federal judge, and I am neither.  I have never represented myself as any kind of expert and I’m not starting now.

  5. “Judge
    Murtha is both a lawyer and a federal judge, and I am neither.  I have
    never represented myself as any kind of expert and I’m not starting now.”

    And yet, that’s exactly what you’ve been doing all along and what you’re still doing.  You say you’re not a judge or a legal expert and yet you insist that Judge Murtha is legally wrong.  You’re making a fool of yourself is what you’re doing.

  6. Obviously, Sutton_Hoo, it’s your prerogative to consider a non-expert daring to question an expert (in this case, a federal judge) “a fool.”  I’m sure many will agree with you.  I prefer to believe that any citizen fortunate enough to live in a democracy is entitled to educate him or herself, as I have taken the time to do, and then to express himself, even when that means disagreeing with expert opinion.  Need I remind you that experts have often been wrong? 

    In terms of the particular issue of Vermont Yankee, I also disagreed with all of the financial experts about the value of the RSA, while making no claim to financial expertise or training. In that instance, the  experts included Bruce Wiggett (former finance VP of VYNPC and a witness for Entergy), Dave Lamont from DPS, and Doug Smith from GMP all argued for a value of the RSA in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, I was so foolish as to declare that the monetary value would likely be close to zero, and that the only real economic value would be the RSA’s value as an insurance policy.

    Bruce Wiggett, for example, estimated that Vermont’s share of “excess revenues” would be between $14+ million and $33+ million for the year beginning late this March. With market rates currently in the $41 per MW range and the “strike price” set at $61 (and rising each year), it is certainly looking like I was right on this one, and that the experts were wrong. 

    Returning to the legal question,this case isn’t over.  While Judge Murtha’s opinion is the law unless it is overturned, there’s a pretty good chance that two higher courts will get a chance to take a second look, and, in my estimation, correct the glaring errors he made.  Time will tell.

  7. Despite the curious spin of this article., this is not a “preliminary injunction”. This is a final decision, handed down by the trial judge.

    Appeals will need to be founded on disputing of methodology of this decision, not rehashing or restarting the trial.

    I was amused to hear Shumlin’s predictable reaction. It strikes me that the reverse could be held with more justification – namely, that the Vermont legislature has not been a trustworthy partner with Entergy, which has been relatively uncomplaining of the brow-beating, pocket-picking and abuse that the governor and his entourage have been using instead of dialog.

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