Protect Millstone’s workers and communities, not its shareholders

The owners of an aging nuclear power plant say they can’t compete with cheap natural gas and ask for a subsidy. Local communities dread the dramatic loss of tax revenue and local services if the plant were to close abruptly. Skilled workers worry about their future after decades of steady employment, and environmentalists worry about increased emissions from new gas-fired power plants. Elected officials call for political action and economic incentives to ensure the plant remains open.

If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s because it describes Connecticut’s Millstone nuclear power plant, as well as many others around the country.

Now imagine an agreement that ensures the plant remains open through the end of its licenses, guarantees a stable tax income for local communities, provides transitional supports for workers, and gives the state time to secure renewable energy resources to replace the nuclear power. A fantasy? No, it’s the story of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, where the workers, the power company, environmental groups and local communities successfully negotiated a long-term strategy for phasing out the plant while protecting workers, communities, and the environment.

Unfortunately, Millstone’s owner, Dominion Energy, has sought to create a crisis atmosphere by claiming that the plant faces imminent financial catastrophe and even closure. They have refused to back up those assertions through financial disclosures. Nonetheless, some politicians have demanded a special deal for the company to ensure the plant stays open “for a few more years.”

This call to “save” Millstone with a short-term fix ignores the likelihood that once we start subsidizing the company, the owners will return – hat-in-hand – over and over again.

Millstone is a source of steady, carbon-free power for the regional grid, and it provides good local jobs for Connecticut workers and taxes for their communities. We want those good jobs – and the local economic activity that depends on them – to continue for decades, not just “a few more years.”

Our energy policy should focus on strategies to keep Millstone’s reactors running through the end of their current licenses – and on preparing in the meantime to replace them with climate-safe, fossil-free energy.

A longer planning horizon increases the feasibility of replacing Millstone with Class I renewables and energy efficiency and facilitates a just transition plan for workers who will be adversely impacted when the facility does eventually retire.

Diablo Canyon’s phase-down agreement not only sustains local communities through long-term tax commitments, it also provides a range of supports for workers and their families: a retention program to maintain adequate staffing until closure, a severance program for workers who lose employment, and retraining to facilitate redeployment of some workers to the decommissioning effort and to other jobs within the parent company.

Alternative economic development that rebuilds the tax base is critical to maintaining a wide range of municipal services and supporting the jobs of hundreds of municipal employees and teachers. Any remedy that includes a special deal for Dominion Energy should require commitments from the corporation to provide transition resources for the workers and communities that have supported the plant for the last four decades.

One big difference for the workers at Diablo Canyon is that they are members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). IBEW Local 1245 gave the workers a voice in the negotiations, so they weren’t dependent on local politicians who could pretend to care about their families’ future by arguing for “a few more years” of stable employment.

A plan to phase out Millstone must include a plan to phase in fossil-free energy in its place, and Connecticut has an opportunity to participate in the ongoing regional expansion of offshore wind resources. Union workers from Connecticut helped build the nation’s first offshore wind farm, a 30-MW facility off the coast of Block Island. Both Massachusetts and New York are actively pursuing large procurements of offshore wind.

Connecticut should follow their lead and initiate procurements of offshore wind resources that could, over time, replace much, if not all, of Millstone’s generating capacity. Construction and maintenance of offshore wind facilities in leased federal waters south of Massachusetts and Rhode Island could provide longterm economic activity and employment opportunities for coastal communities and workers after Millstone’s retirement.

Rather than submitting to the doomsday extortion of an out-of-state corporation seeking to squeeze more profits out of Connecticut’s ratepayers, we should demand that our elected officials pursue proactive strategies for building the clean energy future we need – a future that protects not only the climate, but also our workers, their families and their communities.