Via
Ezra at Pandagon: Between 1991 and 2002, Vermont Yankee, Vermont's only nuclear power plant, suffered several substantial security lapses, leading to the worst security rating among the nations 103 reactors. Howard Dean's response was . . . less than agressive, at least until 2002.
The security lapses at Vermont Yankee are listed in the article. Among them:
During a 1998 federal security test, mock terrorists sneaked a fake gun past security and six times scaled, undetected, the plant's security perimeter fence.
The 1998 test was alarming because seven years earlier, protesters had managed to breach the same security by scaling the fence or rafting down an adjacent river. The 2001 security test again penetrated Vermont Yankee's security.
Dean finally took action in 2002, following a report by the State Auditor, Elizabeth M. Ready:
"The lack of funding and overarching coordination at the state level directly impacts the ability of the state, local and power plant planners to be adequately prepared for a real emergency at Vermont Yankee," state Auditor Elizabeth M. Ready wrote in a study issued five months after the Sept. 11 attacks. . .
Ready's audit in 2002 questioned why, with so many warnings about safety, Dean's administration had significantly fewer people committed to nuclear emergency planning than neighboring states.
"Unlike its nearest counterparts, Vermont's Division of Emergency Management has only one full-time and two part-time staff to support" its emergency response program, she wrote. "New Hampshire has nearly 20 full- and part-time staff as well as consultants, while Massachusetts has more than 20 full-time staff to carry out" its program.
Dean nevertheless failed to provide the funding recommended in the report:
But even after Ready's report recommended the state's nuclear preparedness spending triple from $400,000 to $1.2 million, Dean budgeted only half the increase.
That led Dean's state emergency management director, Ed von Turkovich, to tell the Legislature in 2002 that the increase to $800,000 "does not cover the expenses related to the program" and that Vermont's nuclear preparedness was "in trouble, grossly underfunded, under-resourced and has been for years."
To me, this is yet another example of how Howard Dean's record in Vermont renders him a less effective candidate against Bush in the general election. How can Dean attack Bush for having failed the nation in the months before 9/11 when he failed Vermont for almost a decade?