Shutdown battle: A tale of 2 nuclear power plants

• The James A. FitzPatrick nuclear power plant is slated to close in January.
• Indian Point's owners say they'll sue if the state denies them financial incentives slated for upstate plants

One of the few hints that the end may be near for the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in upstate New York is the banner that greets many of its 600 workers as they clock in and out each day.

“Prepare-Perform-Preserve. The Transition,” it reads.

FitzPatrick is slated to close in January, against the wishes of Gov. Andrew Cuomo who's doing all he can to keep the plant open and save the jobs of hundreds of workers. The governor's response has been decidedly different toward Indian Point, the controversial nuclear plant in the Westchester County village of Buchanan.

Cuomo is using his political clout to prevent Indian Point from renewing licenses for its two reactors. "Clearly, this facility poses too great a risk to the millions of people who live and work nearby,” he said last week.

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FitzPatrick and Indian Point have become the central figures in a tale of two nuclear power plants whose next chapter will be written in the coming months as the state weighs a series of  clean-energy proposals that could decide the future of nuclear power in New York and force a legal showdown with Indian Point's owner. The state Public Service Commission has scheduled public hearings on the proposals across the state over the next two weeks.

On a Tuesday in April, as a bracing wind blew in off Lake Ontario, FitzPatrick workers hustled out to their cars after the end of another shift at a nuclear power plant that, since 1975, has provided electricity to some 800,000 homes in central New York.

It’s a scene that likely won’t be repeated much after Jan. 27, when FitzPatrick’s owner, the $12 billion energy company Entergy, shuts the doors of this steel-and-concrete plant and lays off hundreds of workers, leaving many to look for work in a struggling upstate economy and opening a $12.5 million hole in a school budget that depends on FitzPatrick's tax payments to cover its bills.

After railing at Entergy's "callous disregard" for its workforce, Cuomo proposed a series of financial incentives in a bid to keep FitzPatrick and two other struggling upstate nuclear plants — Nine Mile Point next door to FitzPatrick and the Robert Emmett Ginna Nuclear Power Plant near Rochester — open.

Meanwhile, Cuomo has made repeated calls for Entergy's other nuclear facility, Indian Point,  to be shut down, citing the potential for disaster should a nuclear mishap occur.

Entergy will be watching to see if the upstate nuclear plants score some of the financial incentives Cuomo has discussed. Any attempt to reward the upstate plants and exclude Indian Point from such incentives as tax credits for zero-carbon emissions will be met with a lawsuit, Entergy revealed to The Journal News/lohud.

“If they persist down this course, I think it’s reasonable to expect litigation about this proposal and we intend to do everything in our power to insure that Indian Point is included in whatever program New York adopts,” said Michael Twomey, Entergy's vice president for external affairs.

 Major role for nukes

In November, when New Orleans-based Entergy formally announced its plan to shut FitzPatrick, Cuomo responded with a pointed attack on the company’s integrity.

“Good corporate citizenship must appreciate that there are many factors that count as the ‘bottom line,'” he said. “The state of New York will pursue every legal and regulatory avenue in an attempt to stop Entergy’s actions and its callous disregard for their skilled and loyal workforce.”

In the months that followed, Cuomo announced that the upstate plants would play a pivotal role in helping the state achieve its carbon-free emissions goals while acting as a “bridge” to sometime in the future when the state relies largely on renewables. Cuomo envisions the state depending on renewable energy sources — wind and solar among them — for 50 percent of its electricity by 2030 as it works to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The PSC in January approved a $5 billion fund to speed the development of clean energy options and reduce carbon emissions.

“Elimination of upstate nuclear facilities, operating under valid federal licenses, would eviscerate the emission reductions achieved through the state’s renewable energy programs, diminish fuel diversity, increase price volatility, and financially harm host communities,” the governor wrote in a December letter to the PSC.

The decision to close FitzPatrick followed several years of failed negotiations with the state that centered on the fairness of a market in which natural gas prices largely dictate the amount that nuclear power plants can charge, Twomey said.

And with gas prices at all-time lows, Entergy says it’s had a hard time making money. The company has projected FitzPatrick's annual losses at $60 million.

“Right now, in upstate New York, we’re getting around $20 (per megawatt-hour) and, you know, that’s not a lot of money for what it costs us to run the power plant,” Twomey said.

Market conditions also led Entergy to shut down two other Northeast power plants: Vermont Yankee in 2014 and its Pilgrim Nuclear Generation Station in Massachusetts, slated to close in 2019.

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The closings suggest the nuclear industry is undergoing a slow death. Market forces appear to be doing what anti-nuclear activists have been advocating for years, while they invoked nuclear disasters like Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan to ignite public concern.

There are 61 nuclear power plants operating in 30 states in the United States, with 99 reactors, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. New York currently has four power plants with six reactors.

“We’ve been talking to the state for years about improving the market and recognizing the carbon-free attributes that the nuclear plants provide, and nobody did anything to improve the market,” Twomey said. “And then, when we announce we’re closing the plant, and all of a sudden it’s a fire drill. And the bottom line is that what the state appears to be trying to do is simply too late for FitzPatrick.”

Unemployment plagues Oswego 

The single-reactor FitzPatrick plant is named for the late longtime chairman of the New York Power Authority and lies on the western edge of Oswego County, 35 miles north of Syracuse.

The state’s March unemployment figures put Oswego’s rate at 6.9 percent, ranking fourth statewide.

The roads leading to FitzPatrick, past the Jimmie John’s BBQ and auto-repair shops, hint at the area’s struggles. Along the way, some homes with well-kept lawns feature children’s swing sets out back. Other homes badly need paint jobs, with rusting pickups sitting on front lawns.

The loss of 600 well-paying jobs at FitzPatrick— estimated to average around $120,000 per year — in a part of the state already surviving on the margins, would likely cause a wave of pain throughout the region, local officials say.

Entergy plans to phase out the jobs over time beginning in late January, when the headcount at the plant will be halved. Eighteen months later it will be halved again to 150. Others will be brought in to take part in the years-long demolition or "decommissioning" at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Folks are already moving out of the area to other Entergy sites,” said Oswego City Attorney Kevin Caraccioli. “Lots of houses are going to be up for sale.”

Caraccioli has joined a coalition of labor, business and government officials pushing to save upstate nuclear plants they estimate are responsible for some 25,000 jobs, $3 billion of economic activity and 15 percent of the state’s energy supply.

Groups unite over upstate plants

The group calls itself Upstate Energy Jobs and is dedicated to not only saving FitzPatrick but Nine Mile Point and Ginna. They say the three plants contribute $144 million in annual state and local taxes.

Oswego Mayor William Barlow Jr. learned that Entergy would be closing the day before an election that made him the youngest elected mayor in the state at 25.

“You won’t see 600 vacant homes in the city of Oswego,” Barlow said. “Some people will move out who lose their jobs, but the larger impact is less people shopping in department stores; less people shopping at Walmart or the PriceChopper.”

During the plant’s refueling period, also known as “outages,” hundreds of temporary workers stream into town for the extra work, filling up bars, restaurants andhotels.

For the past 20 years, Nick Canale has run Canale’s, an Italian restaurant in downtown Oswego that his grandparents opened in 1954.  His cousins, uncles and an aunt have all worked at FitzPatrick.

“During the shutdown with a refueling, they’re down four, five six weeks,” Canale said. “That’s big to me and the hotels. You can plan on it.”

On those days, Canale runs platter after platter of meatballs, chicken parmigiana up to the plant in Scriba.

But the biggest hurt may be to the surrounding school district, which counts on FitzPatrick to supply some $12.5 million of its $54.5 million budget every year through property taxes.

Sean Bruno, the superintendent of the Mexico Academy and Central School, was on the job just three months in November when he learned that FitzPatrick would be shutting down.

“Obviously, it will have a negative impact and it will hit us in waves,” Bruno said. “First the loss of revenue. And this is tough, $12.5 million out of a $54.5 million budget. Second will be the loss of families and, possibly, students.

“This is something that requires the governor’s intervention and, like I said, we’re grateful for the support he’s shown thus far but we really need him to help develop a more positive outcome, not only for the school district but for the entire community,” he said.

Evacuation issues 'insurmountable' at Indian Point

“How does the governor justify supporting only the upstate nuclear power plants and not Indian Point,” was the question posed to Richard Kauffman, the state’s energy czar at an April symposium at Columbia Law School on the governor’s renewables plan.

The questioner was Cesar Penafiel, a member of Environmental Progress, a group that supports nuclear power as a clean-energy option.

“The short answer to your question is the governor is committed to closing Indian Point not because of the carbon issues but because of safety issues,” Kauffman said. “So we are engaged across a variety of fronts with the operators to close that plant because, when you look at a plant so close to New York City, the evacuation issues are insurmountable… That’s the governor’s very strong point of view.”

Kauffman added: “We have done work on the cost and climate issues of that plant closing, and it can be closed without a material effect.”

Cuomo has cited the dangers of evacuating the area around Indian Point should a nuclear disaster occur, a position mirroring the one his father, Mario, staked out in a successful bid to shut down Long Island’s Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in the 1980s when he was governor.

The governor has used his political clout to engage a broad-based attack on Entergy’s nearly decade-old effort to renew its federal licenses for its two Buchanan reactors. And the PSC has called on Consolidated Edison to come up with a contingency plan should Indian Point close, identifying companies that could make up the electricity that would be lost

But Entergy says it has no plans to go down without a fight

With hearings on the governor’s clean-energy standards scheduled for cities across the state over the next few weeks, the company has taken out ads in local media touting Indian Point’s carbon-free attributes.

“Indian Point employs 1,000 New Yorkers, generates $1.6 billion in economic activity statewide, and produces about 25% of New York City and Westchester’s power – all while emitting no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases,” the ad reads. “Albany has it wrong — Indian Point is not part of the problem; it’s a big part of the energy and climate solution here in New York State.

The ad’s backdrop is a lake in the midst of lush green trees.

Nuke workers can be retrained 

Environmental groups like Hudson River Sloop Clearwater are unpersuaded.

The Beacon-based group, founded by folk singer Pete Seeger, says nuclear energy is neither clean nor carbon free.

“While nuclear reactors do not emit carbon dioxide at the point of power generation, the nuclear fuel chain is responsible for carbon emissions during mining, milling, enriching, construction, transportation and decommissioning,” the group said in a mailing last week.

Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi notes that carbon is emitted when renewable sources of energy like wind turbines and solar panels are constructed as well. "The bottom line is no other form of electricity gives you enormous amounts of baseload power with no emissions the way that nuclear can," Nappi said.

And Clearwater says offering tax credits or other incentives so upstate plants can stay open amounts to “corporate welfare.”

Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental director, says workers who lose their jobs at FitzPatrick could be retrained to work in the renewable energy industry.

She, too, said the governor’s differing approaches to FitzPatrick are Indian Point are “a contradiction.”

“If the state wants to become a leader in renewable energy and establish a truly green-energy economy, the folks who are downsized can be retrained to take some of the new jobs that will be created by the transition,” she said.

Twomey says the demolition jobs require a skill set different from those who work in nuclear plants.

"The guy who's the senior reactor operator, he’s not going to pick up a sledgehammer and be involved in the destruction of concrete walls," Twomey said. "It’s a much different set of skills."

And Twomey says that, if the state wants to make a clean-energy argument in favor of the upstate plants, it would be misguided to leave out Indian Point.

“All the benefits that the state says you get from the upstate nuclear plants — jobs, environmental benefits, economic benefits, reliability benefits — all of those things apply to Indian Point and apply to Indian Point to a greater extent than they do to any of the individual plants upstate," he said. "If you liked FitzPatrick, you should love Indian Point because it delivers more benefits in every respect.”