Documents show heavy Entergy lobbying on Vt. nuke

By Dave Gram
Associated Press / November 6, 2011

"A central issue in the Vermont Yankee case is whether the state is pre-empted by federal law from requiring that the Vernon reactor shut down when its initial 40-year license expires next March. The NRC announced in March of this year that it would grant Vermont Yankee a 20-year license extension"

You can extract lot of information out of this. What happens to federal preemption if the NRC was found to be incompetent with radiological oversight at VY and they have a instinct for pubic falsification. At the end of the day, what enables this culture of lying and falsification is their ability totally to define agency secrets...no oversight of the agency.

Memo says utility, U.S. covered up fault line's existence

 By: PETER BACQUÉ Richmond Times-Dispatch
Published: November 06, 2011

According to the memo, written by U.S. Department of Justice attorney Bradford F. Whitman, his investigation determined that Vepco had a "consistent policy" of not filing "any formal document" that would have informed the Atomic Energy Commission's licensing board and the public about the fault.
At the same time, "virtually the entire Office of Regulation of the (Nuclear Regulator Commission was) …well aware of the fault and determined not to take any immediate action" to stop the plant's construction or reopen the licensing hearings, Whitman wrote in the 1977 memo, which the Richmond Times-Dispatch recently obtained.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission replaced the Atomic Energy Commission in 1975.
Though making false statements to a federal agency is a felony, Whitman recommended against prosecuting Vepco for its alleged failure to disclose the fault because the company's federal regulators participated in the effort to keep the fault quiet.
"It was a really difficult thing for us to do anything as prosecutors because our client agency … was involved," Whitman said Friday. The government "wasn't deceived, it was part of it.

 This proves that a utility and the NRC has a prediliction to lie and do blanten cover-ups...because the agency knows they will never be held accountible. And here we sit in a huge over-up at VY?