A spokesman for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant is defending a plan by the closed plant's owners to pay their property taxes with money from the plant's decommissioning fund.
Vermont Yankee's Martin Cohn says it's been contemplated since the early 1990s — since before Entergy Corp. bought the Vernon reactor — that money for items like property taxes would come from the decommissioning fund after the plant closed, which it did last December.
Entergy owes the state about $2.5 million, and Cohn says it plans to use the decommissioning fund to make a $1.2 million installment on that next week.
The decommissioning fund was set up mainly to pay for dismantling the reactor after its retirement, handling radioactive waste and restoring the site.
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