VERNON — The demolition of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant will be “99 percent complete” by the end of the year, according to a recent estimate from the chief executive officer of Yankee’s owner, NorthStar Group Services.

Scott State, in a telephone interview from his home in Arizona, said that crews have been making good progress in this fall’s good weather, and the reactor building’s wall and interior would be down to the ground by Thanksgiving.

According to recent photographs of the reactor building, there are still concrete walls standing. At one point this fall, two large excavators, which had to be hoisted to the top of the reactor building by a super-large crane, were tearing the building apart, from the top down.

“We plan to have it down to ground level within the next four weeks,” he said.

According to the memorandum of understanding NorthStar has with the state of Vermont, it must remove all structures that are within four feet of ground level, and that will take until Christmas, State said.

The concrete is very thick in the foundation, about two to three feet thick. He estimated the foundation goes 40 to 50 feet into the ground, but the vast majority of it would be left in place.

The company has until 2030 to complete the decommissioning of the Yankee site, and has long said the job would be complete by the end of 2026, but that most work would be done by 2025.

State said all the concrete rubble from the reactor building is being stored on site, but will eventually be shipped to west Texas, at the low-level radioactive waste facility run by NorthStar’s partner, Waste Services.

After the reactor building’s demolition is complete, the concrete will be shipped over a six-month period, State said. He said there is only room for two rail cars at a time to be loaded at the Yankee site.

“Mid-summer, next fall, all that stuff will be gone,” he said.

NorthStar, which bought the Vermont Yankee plant from former owner Entergy Nuclear in January 2019, actually started decommissioning several months before the sale was completed and approved by state and federal regulators.

NorthStar’s plans called for immediately demolition, rather than putting the plant into what essentially is cold storage, the plan adopted by Entergy. Under that plan, no work would have been done at Yankee for decades.

State said that additional field work, site assessments, sampling, studies and reports will take up the rest of 2026, when the company will seek final approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

With the government shut down and continued understaffing at the NRC, State said that approval could take longer than originally expected.

Recent soil testing near the reactor building revealed contamination of PFAS or “forever chemicals,” at significantly above Vermont standards. That contamination is believed to have come from a fire at the plant’s electrical transformer in 2004, on the non-nuclear side of the plant.

The reactor building, which is the last major building left at the 140-acre site, was almost as big underground as it was above ground, State said. The reactor building, which housed the reactor core plus the spent fuel pool, was about five stories high.

The reactor building is located next to the storage site of the radioactive spent fuel from the 42 years the plant operated. The spent fuel is stored in giant concrete and steel casks, and it will remain after decommissioning is completed.

According to the state memorandum, the deep foundation may be left in place after testing shows it is clear of any radioactivity.

NorthStar agreed that the reactor foundation hole would not be filled with the rubbleized concrete from the demolition, but “clean fill,” State said, which will be trucked in to the Vernon site.

He said the other nuclear decommissioning project NorthStar is doing, Crystal River 3 in Florida, will use its rubble-ized concrete for fill, which State said is standard practice – but not in Vermont.

“We will not backfill until the NRC releases the site,” he said.

There are two large trust funds paying for the demolition and clean up work. The second, smaller fund will pay for site restoration. The larger $600 million fund was paid for by the utility customers of the original owner of Vermont Yankee, the Vermont Nuclear Power Corp.

BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – It’s that time of year again. We go back to standard time 2 AM Sunday, so before bedtime tonight, turn your clocks back 1 hour. After a blustery and chilly Saturday, Sunday will be relatively pleasant with partly sunny skies and highs in the 40s. It won’t be as breezy as the past couple of days.

Monday will start off with some sunshine, then clouds will quickly increase as a cold front approaches the area. Showers are likely around mid-afternoon, first in New York, then spreading eastward. Showers will continue overnight, possibly ending as some mountain snow showers early Tuesday morning. Little to no accumulation is expected. Highs on Monday will be warmer, in the 50s. The remainder of Tuesday will be partly sunny with highs in the upper 40s to low 50s. Lows will be mainly in the 30s.

A clipper will bring light rain on Wednesday, especially south. We’ll be on the backside of that on Thursday, which will feature mostly cloudy skies with showers and mountain snow showers. Highs by Thursday will be in the upper 30s to mid-40s.

Clouds will thicken up on Friday, with another cold front expected to bring showers late in the day, continuing overnight. As with the case Monday night, it may end as some mountain snow showers early Saturday morning. Highs on Friday will be in the 50s. The rest of Saturday will be partly sunny but quite chilly. Most spots may not get out of the 30s for highs.

Copyright 2025 WCAX. All rights reserved.

A version of this story by Adora Brown was published on Oct. 29, 2025 by NOTUS. Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.

In Washington, Democrats and national advocates are warning about the growing consequences that the government shutdown will have on Head Start programs across the country.

On Saturday, another wave of funding lapses is set to affect nearly 60,000 more children across 41 states, according to the National Head Start Association.

In Vermont, none of the state’s seven Head Start programs will need to shutter in November, according to Christy Swenson, the Head Start Director at Capstone Community Action and board chair of the Vermont Head Start Association. 

However, several will face temporary closure in early December if the shutdown wears on, Swenson said. Leaders of programs serving two Vermont regions — the Champlain Valley and the Northeast Kingdom — anticipate running out of federal funds by then, they said. 

The federal Head Start program, which provides child care and nutritious meals to more than 700,000 children across the country, and around 1,250 in Vermont, has already faced funding lapses that forced some locations in other states to close completely and others to look for interim funding elsewhere. 

Head Start, together with Early Head Start, aims to serve children from birth to age 5 living in foster care or households with incomes below the federal poverty line, or who are experiencing homelessness. In Vermont, almost one-fifth of children enrolled are unhoused or experiencing housing insecurity, according to an analysis of federal data by a national advocacy group.

“It’s an absolute tragedy,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucuses with Democrats, said about the upcoming lapses. “And it is beyond comprehension that you have a Republican House, which is now in its fifth week of vacation. Maybe they want to come to work and help us resolve this crisis.”

Head Start is funded on annual cycles, which have starting dates that vary from program to program, Swenson said. Once the commitment is renewed, the process of “drawing down” federal funding as it becomes necessary is not affected by the shutdown, she added.

Champlain Valley Head Start in Burlington is only guaranteed funding through Nov. 1, which means their grant ends on Saturday, Sandra Graves, the program’s director, said on Friday. Her program would be able to stay open through November under a continued shutdown, although only by exhausting its financial reserves, she said.

The program, which is operated by the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, serves Chittenden, Addison, Franklin, and Grand Isle counties. Graves’ staff of 63 provides care and programs to 233 enrolled children and their families, she said.

On Dec. 5, in the absence of federal funding or other support, all of the program’s offerings will need to pause, and all staff will be furloughed, Graves said. The annual grant from the federal Office of Head Start is roughly $7.2 million, she said, which represents the program’s entire operating budget save two small state-level grants.

The Head Start program run by Northeast Kingdom Community Action, or NEKCA, has a Dec. 1 funding cycle, but does not possess the financial cushion that Champlain Valley has available, said NEKCA Executive Director Jenna O’Farrell. The program may be able to keep running for a short time after Dec. 1 with a fraction of its previous capacity, but O’Farrell said that isn’t guaranteed.

That program operates eight physical locations across the rural Northeast Kingdom. It serves 160 children and their families, and employs 78 staff members.

Champlain Valley Head Start filed its annual federal funding application on time in August, Graves said. Ordinarily, the request should have been approved in September. But the Office of Head Start has seen cuts to staffing under the Trump administration, and every aspect of Graves’ interaction with federal officials has slowed, she said.

Even once the government opens, Graves has been told her organization’s funding approval might take several weeks. It may be hard to avoid the Dec. 5 deadline even if the shutdown ends in mid-November, she said.

Graves has not heard from the federal Office of Head Start since the shutdown began. Even though reimbursement for stopgap measures would be customary, she said recent federal actions toward other service programs have made her nervous.

The program’s closure would be a “huge, huge loss for our children and families,” Graves said. Apart from being a source of food and services for kids, Champlain Valley Head Start provides child care that allows parents to stay in the workforce, Graves added.

Graves has applied for temporary state funding from the Vermont Emergency Board, which on Wednesday approved a state-funded stopgap for lost federal food assistance. Champlain Valley Head Start will need about $1 million to remain stable over the next two months, Graves said.

O’Farrell said she too plans to apply for funding from the state’s Emergency Board. NEKCA’s Head Start program’s monthly expenses total roughly $450,000.

A closure would cause an “immediate, severe impact on low-income families across our service area,” O’Farrell said. 

Federal finger pointing

Outside of Congress, pressure from nonprofit groups is starting to pick up as Head Start programs look for solutions elsewhere.

“They are working with their states, working with their counties, working with their school districts, looking within their agencies, talking to philanthropic partners, just really trying to do everything that they can to avoid children and families being the collateral damage of the political fights in Washington,” said Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director of the National Head Start Association, a nonprofit that represents Head Start organizations and programs in Washington, D.C.

“They’re not gonna be able to hold that back forever,” Sheridan added.

Across the country, some Head Start programs already lost funding on Oct. 1 when their fiscal year ended, but the Saturday Nov. 1 deadline will have an even bigger effect because programs in the vast majority of states will lose their federal funding.

More than 100 organizations signed a letter released Tuesday, led by the First Five Years Fund, a nonprofit that supports child care and early education programs. In it, they asked Congress to end the shutdown.

“We cannot allow political gridlock to take away opportunities from our youngest learners and their families,” the letter reads.

But the pressure appears to have little effect on Republicans on Capitol Hill, even though lawmakers are aware that programs in their states could close. The Florida Head Start Association wrote in a press release that seven grantees won’t get a federal check on Saturday, bringing the total number of affected children in the state to almost 9,000.

“Isn’t it awful that the Democrats are doing this?” Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., told NOTUS. Her comment is in line with Republicans’ messaging strategy of placing blame on Democrats for the shutdown as they withhold votes due to expiring health care subsidies.

In a statement to NOTUS, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also tried to place the blame on Democrats.

“More than 58,000 children are on course to lose access to Head Start funding and programs on November 1 due solely to the Democrat-led government shutdown,” a spokesperson for the federal department said in a statement to NOTUS.

Despite the fact that many programs for low-income families are barrelling toward losing federal funding, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and WIC, senators seem no closer to ending the shutdown stalemate.

The home state of Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., would be one of the most affected by Head Start funding lapses. 

When asked what people in Florida are saying about losing programs that help low-income families, Scott said, “They’re fed up with the Democrats shutting down the government.”