A federal judge ruled on January 19 in favor of Entergy Corporation of Louisiana, which sued Vermont because the state ordered the company to permanently close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant just over two months from now, on March 21. "Despite a lifetime of seeing the little guy go down in the United States 'justice' system, many of us felt that the fact that we have justice and the truth on our side should have made a difference in the federal court system," said Nancy Braus of Brattleboro. She is a member of the Safe and Green Coalition, which works to close Vermont Yankee.

Leslie Sullivan Sachs is a spokeperson for the Coalition. "We are not taking this lying down," she said. "We need each other more than ever." The group is organizing rallies at the entrance to Vermont Yankee on January 20 at 3:45 p.m. and on January 21 at a time to be announced. Additional rallies are being planned for March. Details are at www.SafeAndGreenCampaign.org

Web sites for two more groups that have played leading roles in the movement to close the reactor are at www.NukeBusters.org and www.vpirg.org

No new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the U.S. since 1978. Protests preceded the shutdown of the Shoreham, Yankee Atomic, Millstone I, Rancho Seco, Maine Yankee and at least a dozen other U.S. nuclear power plants. An 2007 article in the Journal of American History did not hesitate to give protesters credit for the decline of the nuclear power industry: "The protesters lost their battle [when Diablo Canyon opened in 1984], but in a sense they won the larger war, for nuclear plant construction ended across the country in 1986."

More on this history is at

www.ValleyPost.org/2011/03/14/japan-quake-puts-valley-nuke-local-spotlight