BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Nuclear plant opponents may have hailed the decision by Entergy Corp. to shut down the 620-megawatt Vermont Yankee reactor at the end of 2014, but closing the plant in Vernon has come at a price to the region’s workforce.
It also came at a cost to planners around the tri-state region, including Franklin County, which was home to more than 150 of the plant’s nearly 625 employees in 2011.
Those planners gathered Friday afternoon to discuss lessons learned in the wake of the 42-year-old plant’s closing, to help guide other regions, especially rural areas, that could face closure of a nuclear plant or even loss of a major employer that is a source of local earned income, tax revenue and contributor to charities in funding and volunteer time.
With an estimated 20 nuclear plants expected to shut down over the next couple of decades, the first-of-its-kind, federally-funded report is aimed at helping host communities around the country, said Franklin Regional Council of Governments Administrator Linda Dunlavy.
“We realized there’s a fair amount of information and a lot of time spent on how you decommission a plant, but there were no examples of how you deal with the economic impact and with economic recovery,” Dunlavy said. “This was the first closure where not only were people thinking of decommissioning, but how are we dealing with the loss of these high-paying jobs? If there wasn’t an example in the country, and we were the first example, we should tell people what to expect.”
Even though its federal operating license was due to expire in 2012, closing of the plant had not been anticipated in Franklin County’s Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, she said. And Franklin County was not alone.
“It was not on our radar. When the news came out (in August 2013), it was a kick in the pants,” said Tim Murphy of the Southwest (N.H.) Region Planning Commission at the Brattleboro conference attended by regional planners from all three states.
“There are also lessons to be learned about a major employer whose site and physical plant present land use and orderly redevelopment questions including plant decommissioning, site restoration, the presence of hazardous materials, and complex regulatory frameworks,” said a report authored by the Windham Regional Commission and paid for with part of a $204,000 federal Economic Development Administration grant.
Vermont Congressman Peter Lynch, who attended the conference along with Vermont U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, said “This is really going to set a model that’s crucially important to our region … three states … but it’s also going to really be a model about how other nuclear facilities decommission. … We’ve got to make certain that procedures that are enacted for decommissioning decisions absolutely, fundamentally include the local community.”
Since it shut down at the end of 2014, Vermont Yankee has decreased personnel from approximately 550 to roughly 125 this July, and it anticipates cutting that number to just 24, mostly security staff, once its spent fuel has been transferred from the wet pool to dry casks by 2021.
Adding to the ripple effects in the region’s overall economy, most of the jobs lost were high paying – on average, 2.5 times that of an average worker in the region, according to the report, with employment there accounting for nearly three times its share of the region’s overall payroll.
The total economic impact within seven years of the plant’s closing was projected by the planning agencies to be a loss of more than 1,100 jobs and $480 million in annual economic activity.
The impact of those job losses, the report noted, is heightened because of the so-called “SAFSTOR” time frame for decommissioning of up to 60 years, with a rapid drop off in employee numbers until then. (Yankee Atomic’s decommissioning in Rowe was accomplished within 15 years of its shutdown, keeping more of the plant’s workforce employed longer, by comparison.)
Yet one benefit of the plant’s closing has been that the three planning agencies have begun cooperating to align and document what are overlapping healthy economic clusters, such as “a green and sustainable building sector” for which the region has received federal development funding.
In the report, planners emphasized that “early, ongoing and neutral” engagement in Vermont’s regulatory processes helped the Windham Regional Commission to understand what the impacts would be whenever Vermont Yankee was to close, and develop policy positions about the impacts.
The COG, which has had the advantage of going through closing of the Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe in 1992 and its decommissioning in 2007, was able to make use of a University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute independent analysis of the Vermont plant’s shutdown impact.
Here, planners found, the greatest impact from the closing is out-migration of the highly skilled, highly paid employees, together with their families, since many of those workers were recruited to work elsewhere.
With 14 reactors closed or announced for closure since October 2012 — including planned shutdown of Pilgrim Station by mid-2019 — the planning agencies with nuclear plants “should research the economic performance of these plants relative to other power generators, as well as any regulatory issues that may contribute to a decision to close a reactor prior to the expiration of its license, to understand what the risks of closure might be.”
And given the volatility of the energy sector, agencies with any type of power station should consider the place of that facility in the local economy, and how its potential closing could relate to the economic development strategy for the area — even if that planning effort is interpreted by the company as being not supportive of the company.
Planners also encouraged other regions to form community advisory panels while their nuclear plants are still operating. They should include representation from the plant as well as state authorities, but remain independent. Those panels play “an essential role for public engagement,” said Chris Campany of the Windham Regional Commission.
Without assistance like that provided by UMass Donahue Institute or federal economic strategy funding for the Brattleboro area, planners said, “Local economic development and planning entities can be placed at a serious disadvantage as they try to make sense of what is presented. To this end, local entities should have resources to access their own experts to process information in a way that allows them to arrive at their own conclusions.”