Vermont Yankee cooling towers coming down, marking the 'end of an era'

VERNON — Josh Unruh, the town selectboard chair, sat in a metal folding chair under a pop-up blue tent Thursday afternoon, looking across a field as two giant excavators tore down Vermont Yankee’s eastern cooling tower.

“It’s definitely bittersweet to see the end of an era, the end of what was the identity of Vernon for many years,” he said.

The cooling towers, built in the early 1970s of rot-resistant Douglas fir and redwood, were notably not the giant parabolic concrete towers often associated with nuclear power plants. Each of the plant’s two towers — 42 feet tall and 462 feet long — contains 11 individual cells, sided with fiberglass louvers.

NorthStar, the new owner of Vermont Yankee, had set up two tents and chairs for a cooling tower takedown viewing. A giant 365CL Caterpillar was grabbing chunks of the tower — wooden beams, cement boards, a huge blue flower-like fan — from the north side, throwing them to the ground. A smaller but still formidable excavator was attacking the tower from its elongated west side. A remotely operated industrial sprayer shot water on the working area to mitigate dust.

Read more: https://vtdigger.org/2019/07/11/vermont-yankee-cooling-towers-coming-down-marking-the-end-of-an-era/