Flotilla protests Vermont Yankee's discharges into Connecticut River

Marlboro residents Rose Watson and Laura Berkowitz share their boat with an unnamed protester during Saturday's Safe and Green flotilla. More than 100 anti-nuclear activists gathered along the Connecticut River to tell the owners of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to stop dumping the reactor's thermal discharge into the river. (Josh Stilts/Reformer)The resistance against Vermont Yankee's extended operations continues with a passion. As reported by the Brattleboro Reformer, last Saturday, over 100 demonstrators took to the Connecticut River, by canoe, kayak, sail and fishing boat, and other watercraft, to protest thermal, toxic chemical, and radioactive discharges from Entergy Nuclear's Vermont Yankee atomic reactor into the biologically productive, and fragile, ecosystem (see photo, left).

Not only is Vermont Yankee leaking radioactive water from degraded underground pipes into the area groundwater, which then flows into the Connecticut, but it also "routinely" discharges heat, radioactivity, and toxic chemicals into the river with an expired "zombie permit" from the U.S. federal government.