BRATTLEBORO — Groups opposed to the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's request for a new 20-year operating license have 60 days beginning next week to ask the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hear their concerns.

But if the NRC's track record on granting such requests is any indication, they're likely to come away frustrated.

The NRC has granted license extensions for 39 of the nation's 103 commercial reactors; it is currently reviewing applications from 12 more. So far no intervener hearings have been held.

The NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is the first stop for such a request. Last month, it said it would hold hearings on contentions raised by a coalition of environmental groups about corrosion in the reactor containment at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey, which also is seeking to extend its license.

Both plant owner AmerGen and the NRC staff have appealed the Oyster Creek decision to the NRC's five commissioners. In two previous instances in which the licensing board granted petitions for hearings — on two plants in the Carolinas — the commission reversed those decisions.

The relicensing review process also looks at a much narrower range of issues than those routinely raised by industry critics. Worries about a nuclear plant's vulnerability to terrorism, the lack of a permanent disposal site for radioactive waste or the chances that an evacuation plan will work in a real emergency are not considered germane, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

"The commission has said time and time again that issues like emergency planning, spent fuel storage and security should be dealt with in the here and now and not in connection with a license renewal," Sheehan said.

Despite those odds, Raymond Shadis, adviser to the anti-nuclear group New England Coalition, said his group would seek to intervene. "Of course we are."

Shadis acknowledged that the hurdles are high. "Over time the NRC has accrued unto itself case law. (The industry has) won little bits and pieces and over time and in the aggregate they have damn near eliminated the public hearing right," he said.

He also complained that while a nuclear plant could take a year or more to prepare a license renewal application, opponents will have 60 days to try to absorb 900 pages of highly technical material and hire expert witnesses "willing to put their professional reputations on the line" to challenge the application.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams said plant engineers actually had spent 2-1/2 years preparing the application, and that it was 1,100 pages. "It involved 40,000 engineering staff hours," he said.

He added, "We think that two months is an adequate time for anyone who wishes to intervene to decide whether they want to do that."

Shadis said it would take some time to develop the issues his group might want to raise. One could be the same sort of corrosion seen in the primary reactor containment at Oyster Creek, he said.

"When they ordered all the parts and pieces (when Vermont Yankee was built), they were specified for 40 years of endurance," Shadis said. "Now not only do they want to run them beyond that time, but ... exposed to more extreme conditions," stemming from the plant's recently won permission to increase its power output by 20 percent.

Jonathan Block, a Putney lawyer who has represented the anti-nuclear Citizens' Awareness Network in past regulatory proceedings, said the odds of getting a hearing before the NRC were not as long as some were trying to paint them.

"It's propaganda that the agency (NRC) is putting out with the intent of discouraging participation in this process," he said.

Sheehan said industry's unbeaten record on winning license extensions — it has a similar record on requests to increase the plants' power output — shouldn't be taken as an indication that nuclear plants get a free pass from the NRC.

"You have to look at the broader perspective here. Before companies even submit applications (for license renewal) they have to do a tremendous amount of advance work," Sheehan said, adding that the license renewal process typically costs a nuclear plant owner about $10 million.

Sheehan said once the application is submitted there was extensive back-and-forth between the utility and the NRC as NRC staff ask for clarifications or more information about a wide range of technical issues. He added that while the NRC hadn't rejected any applications outright, it had sent two back for more work.

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