Yankee ingenuity

Exactly one year after Maine Yankee decided to pull the plug, New England’s nuclear customers got something they’ve been looking for — good news about decommissioning costs. And Wiscasset got something that’s been in awfully short supply lately — hope for a troubled economic future.

The selection of Stone & Webster Engineering of Boston Tuesday to lead the decommissioning project makes sense for several reasons, beyond its low bid. The company that helped design and build Maine Yankee a quarter-century ago should have a pretty good, cost-effective idea of how to take it apart. The fixed-price agreement — a first for decommissioning projects that will be watched closely by the nuclear industry nationwide — for roughly $250 million virtually guarantees no surprises for ratepayers, who ultimately will pick up most, if not all, of the tab. And while in a perfect world the job would have gone to a Maine business, Stone & Webster is a union contractor and is committed to hiring as many Maine workers as possible. It is estimated that the four- to five-year project will employ an average of 175 people a week, up to 400 during some stages.

But for Wiscasset, a town that has seen its tax base slashed in half and its property taxes soar with the shutdown, the most intriguing part of the plan may be Stone & Webster’s option to convert the site to a natural gas-fired power plant, a plant that possibly could produce almost twice the electricity of Maine Yankee at its peak, along with a lot of good replacement jobs and tax revenue.

There are a lot of factors favoring the gas plant conversion, such as the availability of a site already developed for heavy industrial use and its connection to the region’s power grid. And there are a lot of ifs, such as determining whether the existing turbines, generators and other equipment are compatible with gas, although the contract specifies that uncertainties about the conversion will not delay the actual decommissioning. The biggest impediment, the fact that none of the companies now creating Maine’s natural gas infrastructure have immediate plans to pipe Wiscasset, likely would disappear in a hurry if a major industrial customer, such as a power plant, moved to town.

The overall acceptability of the decommissioning plan is evident in the reaction of Maine Yankee’s most fervent opponents, who greeted the Stone & Webster announcement with familiar fretting: Yes, the safety of the workers and of the community must be paramount; yes, the decommissioning of a nuclear plant must have regulatory oversight at least as diligent as that given to its operation; yes, the disposal of radioactive components will be a huge problem.

The large reactor vessel probably will be shipped to a low-level waste dump in South Carolina. A difficult task to be sure, but, between the supervision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Wiscasset code enforcement officer, one that most likely will be done properly.

The spent fuel rods are a different story. The NRC was to have a national repository developed by early this year. It did not and there is little hope it will for the next 15 years. Maybe 25, maybe 50. Until such time as the NRC develops the political will to do so, Maine Yankee and the nation’s more than 100 other nuclear plants nearing the end of their lives have no choice but to store that material. Safely and securely.

Although Maine Yankee closed down a decade earlier than originally expected, its story is that of the entire nuclear industry: a brilliant start, full of the promise of clean, cheap power; an end filled with expense and worry. For the ratepayer, the Stone & Webster contract addresses the expense issue about as well as could be expected. It may even do something about Wiscasset’s worry.