The buzz on the nuclear blogs this week is the recent claim by Peter Shumlin, president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate, that Germany gets 30 percent of its electricity from solar energy.

Shumlin made the claim on Fox Business News while being interviewed about the Vermont legislature’s decision to close down the 600-megawatt Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently trying to find the source of a small tritium leak that has showed up in test wells around the plant. While Shumlin was still on the air, a Fox News commentator checked Wikipedia and told him the figure was only 1 percent. “That’s just Wikipedia,” countered Shumlinm and said that the 30 percent figure is “what I’ve been told.” (Rod Adams, who runs the excellent Atomic Insights blog, says the correct figure is 0.6 percent.) When pressed about where Vermont was going to go to replace one-third of its electricity, Shumlin confidently predicted “the whole country is moving to renewables.”

Shumlin’s wild claims exemplify exactly how and why the whole country is “moving to renewables.” Somebody told somebody about something that’s supposedly going on over in Europe and we’re going to do the same thing here.

Good luck, Vermont. It’s going to be amusing to watch the Green Mountain State slide back to nature.