Legislative

Fourth installment of "Inside Your Statehouse". Produced by Rick McMahan.

Vermont Student Towards Environmental Protection presents a UVM Teach-in on Vermont Yankee

Speakers include: Maggie Gunderson, founder and president of the Burlington, VT-based Faire Winds Associates, a paralegal and expert witness firm specializing in issues of nuclear reliability issues, Jared Margolis, Attorney for the New England Coalition and Environmental Law professor at UVM
and Chris Williams, organizer with the Vermont Citizens Awareness Network

UVM, Billings North Lounge, on Tuesday, March 13^th, from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.Brooke Shaffer, member of the Vermont Student Environmental Program (VSTEP), the campus club that is sponsoring the teach in said, “It is so important, as the state of Vermont works to retire this accident prone reactor on schedule this year, that students, and the general public become better informed about the environmental and safety issues surrounding the operations of a 40-year-old reactor, and the long term storage of high level waste on the banks of New England’s longest river.”

Gunderson speaks on the similarities between Vermont Yankee, a GE Mark I boiling water reactor, and the reactors that suffered catastrophic containment failures at the Fukushima Daiichi facility in Japan a year ago.

Margolis speaks on the State of Vermont’s legal and regulatory efforts to close the Vermont Yankee reactor on schedule, and to address the storage of high level waste in Vernon.

Chris Williams, of the Vermont Citizens Awareness Network, speaks about the grassroots citizens campaign to support the State of Vermont in retiring the reactor.

Senator Patrick Leahy Leahy, Champlain College student activists and a representative of Invisible Children discuss the KONY 2012 campaign, aimed at bringing African war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. A documentary on the issue, KONY 2012, has gone viral on the internet, netting nearly 50 million hits on YouTube since Monday, March 5. Leahy, chairman of the Senate’s budget panel for the State Department and Foreign Operations, is a longtime U.S. leader on issues relating to war crimes and criminals and the innocent victims of war and conflict. He recently included funding in the U.S. foreign aid budget to help Kony’s victims – many of them children -- and he has long supported efforts to capture Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has terrorized the people of northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa for more than two decades. The victim assistance funding secured by Leahy will be discussed in Leahy’s annual budget hearing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which will implement those efforts. Kony and his forces have kidnapped children and forced them to become soldiers and to kill and mutilate members of their own families. Adonga Quinto, a northern Ugandan who was kidnapped by the LRA, discusses his experiences. Also speaking, Sadie Stone, a Champlain College student who has joined the effort to bring Kony to justice.

Senator Patrick Leahy announces significant new funding for water quality, fisheries and ecosystem restoration work on Lake Champlain during the coming year. The federal dollars, just recently confirmed, are part of the FY2012 budget. Leahy is a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the funds he secures for Vermont have long been the main engine for cleanup efforts involving the Lake and its watershed.