The 18 Percent Western Union Message 
By Martin Harris

Recent high school grads, you may have observed, are highly knowledgeable in texting. A 2008 Common Core study showed that they’re not highly knowledgeable in history,  most having disdained to learn the right century in which to place Columbus, the Civil War, or World War I, and only bare majorities knew enough to answer correctly easy questions about the Renaissance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. No such quizzes have asked a question about Western Union; I’d guess that such grads would identify it as a California labor organization, and not as the predecessor of texting. Once, all messaging equipment was corporate-owned, and messages were sent via call-in to, or write-in at, the nearest Western Union office, thence by wire to a WU office near the destination, thence as a printed-tape-text-pasted-on-a-yellow-form delivered by bicycle messenger to the recipient’s home or workplace. Some of the same weird little spelling short cuts now used in electronic texting were first invented for WU telegrams. 

So well was WU once known as the technology-based vendor for concise and timely transmission of information or ideas that it became the tag-line of a Hollywood aphorism crediting various Hollywood moguls more interested in selling high-profit lower-IQ entertainment than low-profit higher-IQ social-engineering with instructing their writers that "if you want to send a message, call Western Union". In declining order of attribution frequency, the author was Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, or Louis Mayer. 

I recite this history from the era of the 15-cent double-feature-plus-cartoons-plus-newsreel "air-cooled inside" movie ticket because, such industry lore notwithstanding, the art of sending subtle political messages was practiced then in Hollywood –think "the Grapes of Wrath" or "Christ in Concrete"--  and is practiced today in politics. Think, for example, through the implications of Entergy’s recent advice to Vermont’s Golden Dome folks that it proposes to cut its power sales into Vermont meters from 50% of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant output down to 18%, as the 19 December issue of The Rutland Herald reported. For high school grads disdainful of math proficiency (about 2/3 of them, the NAEP tests show) that’s a  64% reduction. The Herald was careful to tell readers that the ratepayer cost would go up 52.5%, but not that 82% of the Vernon plant’s output would now be sold beyond Vermont’s borders and the reach of Vermont’s legislators. Unvocalized Entergy message: "we can pull the remaining 18% if we choose to".  You can’t send a direct verbal message via Western Union any more (money transfers only, please; the traditional telegram service ended in 1999) but non-direct-verbal messages can still be implied by senders and (sometimes) inferred by receivers in such similar venues as movie theaters and legislative-assembly halls. One such was just sent, I would opine. Whether it was accepted and understood I know not.

The 18% message isn’t the way I (wrongly) expected Entergy to express its frustration with its Vernon-sited reactor’s role as Vermont’s on-going political sacrifice. I knew about the frustration, having heard it expressed in extremely circumspect language after a mini-seminar on the subject of Vermont’s power future back in late 2005, but it had focused on the long-term de-commissioning-funds argument, and the Golden Domers’ shut-down threats hadn’t yet really started.  Entergy’s 2002 purchase decision at Vernon was likely based, at least in part, on its relatively-easy 2001 re-licensure of its Arkansas reactor until 2034, and I’d guess that the New Orleans executive suite was somewhat blind-sided by the anti-relicensing fervor which subsequently filled Vermont’s Golden Dome in regard to the Vernon reactor’s 2012 re-licensing date.  I didn’t expect Entergy in 2007 to spin off Enexus, a wholly-owned subsidiary charged with handling all of its "non-utility nuclear business" (such as, e.g., VY de-commissioning) but  I did theorize (wrongly) that the company might invoke exactly those "safety concerns" constantly claimed and recited by critics, as the basis for a time-indeterminate Vernon shut-down  during which period Vermont ratepayers would get a taste of power costs without Vernon and with spot-market-purchase replacement power instead, and might convey, to their elected representatives, their displeasure over such costs becoming permanent. That wouldn’t be an 18% message; it would be a 100% no-VY-power message.

Conceivably, it could still be sent. In deciding whether to recognize it, Vermont politicians might want to contemplate VY’s less-than-stellar place in the overall Entergy power-generation universe, which consists of about 78,000  GigaWatthours overall and 4998 MegaWatthours in the non-utility nuclear sector, within which latter category VY produces 605 MWh. That’s 12% of the non-utility sector, and a statistically zero percentage of Entergy’s total energy operation.  VY is by far the smallest of Entergy’s nuclear plants, either utility or non-utility; all the others are closer to, or larger than, a 1000 MW average capacity. I’d guess, basing my comparison on the smoothness of the two Arkansas plants’ 2001 re-licensing out to 2034, that the New Orleans executive suite might be viewing VY’s current re-licensing torments, including compost-throwing theatrics by Vermont activists, as more troublesome than the earnings from the 605 MW output are worth. 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights