The time of death came a few hours after the shutdown began at 1:03 pm on Monday.
Soon after, the eulogies came pouring in, as dozens of regional and national news outlets reported on the “end of an era,” marked by plant owner Entergy Corporation taking the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt., through its final shutdown after 42 years of feeding the regional grid with low-cost, low-carbon electricity.
Despite the global call for power that matches that description, Entergy officials announced in August 2013 that economics had forced their hand and that they would close the plant on the Connecticut River five miles north of the Massachusetts border that was licensed for operation on March 21, 1972 and was granted a 20-year license extension in March 2011.
New Orleans-based Entergy, which purchased the plant in 2002 from eight local utilities, even won a legal challenge from the state in January 2012, when a federal judge said the state government did not have the authority to close the plant.
With all those factors in the plant's favor, none of them insignificant, Entergy finance executive Barett Green explained that economics favored shale gas development, which has undermined pricing across the established power industry.
“We look at the long run. The price of natural gas, because of the shale developments, has fundamentally changed the outlook for the energy infrastructure of the United Strates. The movement toward carbon constraints has not been as effective or as fast as we had expected,” Green said.
Entergy had bet that a carbon tax would give nuclear power a boost at the expense of fossil fuel-burning power plants that produce 32 percent of the country's carbon emissions, the Boston Herald said.
Instead, regulatory costs rose as the industry was forced to react to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the March 2011 earthquake event in Japan that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi NPP.
By the numbers, Vermont Yankee leaves a legacy. The relatively modest 620 megawatt plant, upgraded from 500 MW in 2006, produced 71.8 percent of the electricity generated in Vermont, including 35 percent of the electricity consumed by Vermonters. It paid hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local taxes, generating 171 billion kilowatt hours of electricity over the years. At its peak, the plant employed 625 permanent workers, which does not count additional help hired for routine shutdowns and and big maintenance events.
Anticipating the close, the plant had been running at 74 percent capacity recently.
One newspaper noted that the five nuclear power plants in New England in 2013 – Vermont Yankee, Millstone 2 and 3 in Waterford, Conn., Pilgrim Station in Plymouth, Mass., and Seabrook Station in Seabrook, N.H. – could supply New England with one third of its electricity demand. By itself, Vermont Yankee could power half a million homes.
It could also be said that the plant supplied jobs for activists. One organization, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, opened its doors in 1972, the year that Vermont Yankee went online. Since then, the group said the plant had been the most time-consuming issue its lawyers and staff has confronted over the past 42 years.
The shutdown was endorsed by grid operator ISO New England in 2012. The Nuclear Energy Institute countered ISO's claim that the grid stability would survive, by calling attention to the potential for grid instability.
With that argument in mind, perhaps, the Boston Globe began its coverage of the shutdown by saying the grid, while the plant went offline, “didn't even blink.”
Entergy spokesman Marty Cohn called Monday's shutdown “bittersweet.” Reactions among residents in the region was mixed.