July 10, 1998 Heat Wave Is Stressing Utilities ______________________________________________________________ Filed at 4:29 p.m. EDT By The Associated Press CHICAGO (AP) -- Utilities across the nation are on the hot seat this summer, sweating over generating enough power to keep customers cool while keeping factories running. What seemed like a simple premise -- matching supply with demand -- has become fraught with problems. Utilities are plagued by aging plants and power-transmission networks at a time when Americans' love of gadgets is putting more of a strain on the system. There already was one scare during a heat wave last month, when utilities saw their electric reserves depleted and storms knocked out some service. Now, at least one major power provider now is proposing paying big business to turn off electricity in the next crunch. ``I hear the temperatures are going up next week,'' David Stahr, research director of Illinois watchdog group Consumer Action, said Friday. ``Unfortunately for consumers, that appears to be a problem for utilities.'' In anticipation of new stress on utilities, prices of contracts for electricity spiked higher Friday on commodity futures exchanges. In a sign of the new industry interest, the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday began trading two new contracts for delivery of electricity in the eastern United States. Soaring electricity rates, defaults on power-purchase agreements and deteriorating plants and equipment owned by monopolistic utilities highlight the challenges facing consumers, regulators and utilities as at least 12 states move toward electricity deregulation. Deregulation is supposed to open up new competition and savings for consumers, but there are many questions on how the fledgling experiment will work. The old system is providing mysteries, too. ``Frankly, we're still trying to figure out exactly what's happening,'' said James Owen, spokesman for Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for public utilities. ``Utilities recently had to scramble to come up with power to meet customers' needs, but it's important to remember that the system did work, there were no major blackouts.'' Utilities were forced during a late June heat wave in the East and Midwest to beg and borrow electricity. Many also had to dust off ``rolling'' blackout plans to avoid unthinkable cascading outages as reserves dwindled to nothing. Electricity that was selling in the range of $30 per megawatt hour soared as high as $7,500 in late June when a powerful storm that downed transmission lines and unexpected plant shutdowns caused some power marketers to default on contracts. In the wake of the public black eye some utilities have received since, Chicago-based ComEd this week promoted the unusual idea of paying big businesses in northern Illinois the going rate for electricity to turn off all power at a moment's notice. ``ComEd has had a plan in excess of 20 years to always keep supply and demand in balance, including all manner of public appeals, paid-for interruptions and the ability to purchase emergency power before rolling blackouts would be instituted,'' said Paul McCoy, the utility's senior vice president. ``The alternative is to allow an uncontrolled broad cascading outage.'' Utilities for decades have relied on a system in which they generate power from nuclear-powered or coal-fired plants. They buy power from each other when demand is heavy. It then is routed through a series of transmission grids across the nation. But over the past decade, as Americans increasingly use more high-powered devices at home and at work, nary a new power generation plant has been built, and the aging transmission grids can shuttle only so much power before burning out. And nuclear power plants have not lived up to their reputation, with many operating below optimal performance levels, shut down unexpectedly or for maintenance. No new plants are on the way. ``Part of the truth of it is that some companies ... are waiting to see what happens with the deregulation issues,'' said Owen of the Edison Electric Institute. ``It is true that some people believe that reserve margins may be not where they ought to be, but the system continues to work.'' The Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union this week said an examination of early deregulation efforts found residential customers had received few savings. The groups predicted bills actually may increase. Critics, meantime, contend utilities are placing an unacceptable risk on business and residential customers. ``They're gambling on the ability to wheel in more power,'' Citizen Action's Stahr said. ``They're gambling on the weather (being cooler than normal) to reliably keep lights on.'' Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company The information contained in this AP Online news report may not be republished or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. ______________________________________________________________ July 12, 1998 As Nuclear Plants Close, Communities Face New Era By CAREY GOLDBERG WISCASSET, Maine -- Things change when a place goes post-nuclear. Almost a year ago, Maine Yankee, the state's only nuclear plant and once New England's biggest electricity producer, stopped generating power here for good, to the joy of nuclear opponents, the regret of the townfolk who depended on its taxes and jobs, and the pain of its hundreds of workers. The 25-year-old plant had long been one of the most divisive issues in Maine and had survived three referendum votes on closing it over the years. But ultimately, it was stopped not by politics but by economics: Plagued by safety concerns and with electricity deregulation coming on, it could no longer operate competitively, its owners decided. That ending was also the beginning of a new phase, one that is becoming ever more common in host towns around the country as aging nuclear plants shut down and the nuclear industry withers. Tensions dissipate, these towns find, but new problems arise, from economic woes to worry over nuclear waste. The closing of Maine Yankee brought heartfelt relief to those residents who had worried that the warning sirens would break the coastal calm here with a nuclear alert. But the towns that are home to the country's remaining 107 nuclear plants might do well to note what Wiscasset and more than 20 other places where plants have been closed are finding out: all is not resolved with the flick of a switch. Some of the adjustment is economic. In Wiscasset, the uncomfortable pinch of belt-tightening comes across even through Maine stoicism. "No one is jumping out of windows," said Robert Blagden, Wiscasset's first selectman, the closest thing the town has to a mayor. "It's not like a stock-market crash." But Maine Yankee used to pay something like 96 percent of the taxes for Wiscasset, a town of 3,500 on Route 1 that bills itself as "The Prettiest Little Village in Maine" and may not be too far off, with its fine old sea captains' houses and seaweed-podded old pilings. This year, Blagden said, the plant will go from paying Wiscasset nearly $13 million to about $6 million, and townspeople's taxes will rise to make up much of the gap. Assessors are making their ominous rounds these days, and property taxes are expected to double if not triple. So great was the town's dependence on Maine Yankee's jobs, purchases and taxes that Raymond Shadis, the plant's nemesis and spokesman for the anti-nuclear "Friends of the Coast-Opposing Nuclear Pollution," bitingly calls Wiscasset a "cargo cult," willing to worship the nuclear plant in exchange for its bounty. The bounty was plentiful. Wiscasset schools spent a luxurious $12,000 per pupil, the town has a new multimillion-dollar community center, it had free ambulance service and its roads have been thoroughly rebuilt. "It was like living in fairyland," said John Chester, a local freelance writer who serves on a community panel advising Maine Yankee on its shutdown. "Everything you wanted, you got." Not anymore. The most direct losses have fallen to the plant employees themselves. Maine Yankee had 480 full-timers when it closed. Their numbers have been reduced to 166 employees who are maintaining the plant and preparing it for decommissioning, said Maureen Brown, the plant's spokeswoman. About 100 of those who left retired, she said over lunch at "Fission Chips," the plant's little restaurant. In general, she said, about 60 percent of those who found new jobs have moved away. In what used to be Maine Yankee's information center -- and was rapidly converted into its career center last August -- paper balloons tacked to the wall list the names of former workers who have had to go on to new lives, and most of them carry destinations linked with other plants far away: Point Beach in Wisconsin, Millstone in Connecticut, Vermont Yankee. The plant held 78 job fairs and hundreds of counseling sessions, Ms. Brown said, and in general is determined to make its decommissioning a model for other plants, both technically and in human terms. But there are still workers like Jim Weast, a 27-year veteran of the plant, an engineer, licensing expert and its former assistant operations manager, who says he has found, "No one wants to hire a 50-year-old." He has had a chance to work at the Millstone plant in Connecticut, which was recently permitted to reopen after safety concerns shut it for two years, but "that would be out of the frying pan into the fire," he said. "Nuclear power is dead, has been dead for a long time, and the public doesn't realize it," Weast said, sounding more sad than bitter. For Wiscasset and the surrounding area, the economic losses include not only jobs but the money that employees would have spent locally, along with the occasional influx of hundreds of contractors when the plant was preparing to restart, and its purchases of incidentals like office supplies. "There's a huge ripple effect," said state Sen. Marge Kilkelly, who heads the community panel on the shutdown. Though life styles must change, she said, that ripple will fade eventually, and Wiscasset's nuclear era will pass quietly into history just as its shipping heyday and railroad heyday passed: "So be it," she said. But the biggest Maine Yankee concern now is a problem that will not pass so easily: the high-level radioactive waste that the plant produced. It does not seem as if the federal government is going to find a repository for it any time soon. At this point, plant officials say, the government has promised to begin picking up Maine Yankee's high-level waste a decade or two into the 21st century, but many do not count on it. Until then, despite the federal obligation to dispose of the 1,432 spent-fuel assemblies weighing more than 1,500 tons, it stays here, where it is Maine Yankee's, and Wiscasset's, problem. Maine Yankee is suing the government over the waste, but many here expect the plant to become one of more than 100 unexpected waste dumps around the country, wherever plants are. Donald Hudson Jr., a member of the community panel and president of the Chewonki Foundation, a major environmental education center that with 150 workers may soon employ more people than nearby Maine Yankee, predicts the waste will be here long, long after 2050. If that is the case, he said, it is up to the plant and Wiscasset to figure out how to store it safely for hundreds of years. "The drum I keep beating is, how are we going to come up with a system of managing something for a minimum of 500 human generations?" Hudson asked. "The pyramids are only 150 human generations old, and we've got to make something to last at least 500." Waste storage, however, is only one of the issues to arise in the complex process of decommissioning. Shadis, a sculptor who is probably Maine's best-known and most unrelenting opponent to nuclear power, has raised handfuls of other concerns. They range from the possibility that "hot" waste had been trucked to the town dump (none has been found) to questions about whether the plant's eventual demolition would involve blowing up concrete structures that could contain radioactivity "and you wouldn't know until you had a cloud of concrete dust sailing across the river." But, Shadis said, some of the fire has gone out of the fight, and Maine Yankee has become more open than ever before, even allowing him to read its file of "Radiological Incident Reports" of spills over the years. His side has lost ardor, as well, he said: when the plant was closed and he sent out invitations to a celebration, out of a mailing list of 7,000, only 200 or 250 responded. And recently, he said, as he pressed a point at a community panel meeting, a top Maine Yankee official told him to let go, adding, "Ray, you've won." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company