Meredith Angwin has been fighting to save Vermont from itself for several years. She has been publishing a blog at Yes Vermont Yankee, teaching adult education classes about energy, attending public meetings, giving interviews, and participating in debates about energy policy since about 2008. (She’ll let me know if I got the date wrong.)
She recently recognized an important historical point in the struggle to keep the well maintained, reliable (VY’s capacity factor has been between 80-95% for the past decade), emission free power plant on the grid. At a meeting held by the Public Services Commission to determine if the plant should receive a Certificate of Public Good, dozens of plant supporters from as far as several hundred miles took the time to drive to Vernon to provide their short commentary about why they support the plant as a major benefit to the state.
Meredith presciently made contact with many of the speakers and obtained copies of their statements. She featured those on her blog and then realized that the blog posts were a bit transitory and might be forgotten over time. She and her husband have now captured those insightful comments as an eBook (priced at just $2.99) titled Voices For Vermont Yankee. The Kindle version is available from Amazon at http://amzn.to/VZsLhR while the Nook version is available from Barnes and Noble at http://bit.ly/YVgOVi.
It is a good read; especially if you sometimes dispair for American democracy. The people who support the plant are well educated, well spoken and passionate about the importance of clean, reliable, safe energy for now and for the future. I highly recommend the book and gave it 5 stars in my review on Amazon.
Unlike the antinuclear grannies who chain themselves to private property fences in protest of something good – an act that mainly benefits natural gas suppliers – Meredith is a grannie who is working hard to make the world a better, safer and more prosperous place for her children and grandchildren.
Disclosure: I have considered Meredith a close personal friend since we both participated in a nuclear tourist trip to France in the summer of 2010. She is a talented, caring lady who earned her technical chops as a physical chemist with a specialty in understanding and preventing corrosion.
Thank you so much, Rod! I hope this book will be an inspiration to pro-nuclear people to capture more of the good things that supporters say. We rarely capture the good things. Of course, whack-a-mole keeps pro-nuclear people pretty busy. So many accusations, so little time to answer them! But whack-a-mole can never be a winning game, not on its own, at least. We need to record the good stuff, too.