It was bound to happen. Now that industry-insiders-turned-nuclear-watchdogs Arnie and Maggie Gundersen have taken center stage in the legislative showdown over whether Vermont Yankee gets relicensed for another 20 years, the nuclear industry and its supporters have begun their campaign to smear their credibility — just as they did 20 years ago when the Gundersens became whistleblowers about other corner-cutting measures in an industry that once employed them.

On Feb. 11, Rod Adams — “Rod Atoms?” GREAT aptronym! — who writes for the pro-nuclear blog Atomic Insights, wrote a post titled  “Is Arnie Gundersen Devious or Dumb? (Or Is He Just a Professional Fear-Monger?)” . In it, Adams, who describes himself as an Annapolis, Md., “father, husband, brother, nuke…and pro-nuclear activist,” accuses Arnie Gundersen of making statements to the Vermont Legislature that were “evasive, without context or factually incorrect.”

Among the pieces of damning evidence Adams offers for Gundersen’s “lack of context” is the fact that in his testimony on tritiated water, Gundersen “pronounces the word [picocuries] with a hard I” and then drops his units of measure in subsequent references to the radioactive isotope found in test wells near the nuke plant. What a slacker!

This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2010.

Staff Writer Ken Picard is a senior staff writer at Seven Days. A Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Vermont from Missoula, Mont., he was hired in 2002 as Seven Days’ first staff writer, to help create a news department. Ken has since won numerous regional and national awards for his features, profiles and investigative stories and had his work picked up by international news outlets. He was the first journalist to shine a light on the thousands of undocumented workers in Vermont’s dairy...

12 replies on “Gundersens Step Into the Nuclear Crosshairs”

  1. Hmmm. Let’s look at this from a purely non-emotional, business perspective, shall we? Here we have a corporation with several operations in multiple states, all of varying age. The facility in Vernon has been in their charge for more than seven years, yet the company can’t even correctly articulate the layout of its own facility there? Uh, sorry. Big problem with that. Whenever you assume control over an operating plant, whether it be making cars, toys or nuclear power, your first task is to take inventory and map out the facility. Can’t step up to that plate? Then get out of the game and let the pro’s handle it. BTW – I am pro nuclear power.

  2. President Obama — nobody’s fool — is promoting nuclear energy. Is he “doing the insutry’s bidding”? Get real.Geezum, is it just possible that informed people can believe that nuclear energy is not dangerous and should be part of our energy future, without “doing the nuclear industry’s bidding”? Apparently not to some people.But I’m glad President Obama is not one of them. I’ll stick with Obama on this, rather than with the anti-nuke hystericals.

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