The Real Story in the Shutdown of Maine Yankee

Right, same old themes here. A small utility basically operated the plant. They got over their head during contrition and throughout the rest of the life of the plant. Basically they starved funding to the plant leading to outsiders taking advantage of the situation. The collapse of the natural resource industry, massive losses in the pulp industry based on foreigners taking advantage of us just like the rust belt. Local politics fractured leading to the rise of teabaggerism and scrabbles of town control and taxed. Basically Maine has been in a depression since way before the shutdown of the plant. Touristism has changed and is fickle, with our national slow economy, the great recession of 2008 and such, our great manufacturing decline, property values were all over the place and the bifurcation of our society and incomes of recent...that is what is more impacting this town than the closure of the plant.

Right, a electric too high price rebellion was building. Deregulation---to reduce electric prices began in the early 1990s. All the utilities were drastic cutting cost in their fear of deregulation. The Time magazine Millstone nuclear plant scandal occurring in the later 1990s. The old Exelon starved funding to their fleet. The NRc finally cracked down ending in temportary shutdowns. Exelon panicked throwing a lot of money on the nuke fleet. They stole money from the transmission and distribution system later leading into massive component breakdowns and blackouts. Electric prices were exploding, shortages were everywhere. The California power crisis, Enron and Davis Besse was right around the corner. Millstone and the Maine Yankee scandal before shutdown caused a lot of New Englanders not to trust the NRC. All this put the politicians and ultimate owners in a corner. It was a grand failure of the electricity establishment for decades.

I could make the case the pro nuclear industry paid for this article.  They want to make Wiscasset the poster child for not shutting down old dog plants

The moral of this story is how important it is to built and run a nuclear plant competently. Don't give disgruntles the ammo to take you down.      

Maine Yankee fallout: A town’s turmoil, 20 years in the making

By Beth Brogan, BDN Staff

Posted Dec. 17, 2016, at 1 a.m.
Last modified Dec. 17, 2016, at 1:15 p.m.

WISCASSET, Maine — In 1998, still flush with tax money from the Maine Yankee atomic power plant — which had closed two years earlier — Wiscasset opened a multimillion-dollar community center just outside the heart of town.

Now, almost 20 years later, the center remains open, but the community it is serving in this coastal town, billed as “the prettiest village in Maine,” looks like it’s lost its way.

Municipal government is wracked by turmoil, with elected officials resigning, a citizens group aggressively challenging selectmen’s decisions, and basic policy matters decided by petitions and referendum.

A school system that routinely turned away tuition students because it ranked among the best in Maine now struggles with massive enrollment declines, annual budget travails, and questions about its leadership and direction.

Meanwhile, an agreement between state and local officials to try to resolve a traffic bottleneck on Route 1 — after half a century of negotiations — has drawn organized opposition, legal warnings and a petition.

How did Wiscasset reach this point?

Many residents see it as the inevitable fallout from the nuclear plant’s closure. Others see it as a cautionary tale for other Maine communities, such as mill towns, that struggle to adapt when a seismic change occurs to its economic base.

From boom to the edge of bust

For awhile during the quarter century Maine Yankee generated power on Bailey Point, Wiscasset residents — many of them power plant employees who drew an average salary of $54,000 — didn’t even pay for their own utilities.

In 1996, when the plant shut down for good, Maine Yankee paid the town nearly $13 million in property taxes — about 91 percent of the town’s entire tax base, according to tax records.

Former Selectwoman Judy Flanagan, a longtime resident of Wiscasset and a vice chairwoman of the Board of Selectmen until resigning in November, remembers the envious reactions when she told people she lived in Wiscasset.

“Every town would like to have had that pocketbook we had,” she said in an interview.

Two decades later, Maine Yankee’s employees and much of its tax base are long gone. The burden of struggling to live with a slimmer pocketbook has frayed many in a town that longtime resident Bill Sutter said “has developed a big city attitude, with big city amenities and budgets, when we are in fact a small town.”

Town facilities have not been upgraded, or in some cases maintained, since the Maine Yankee years. Most notably, a failing sewer plant has violated environmental standards for a second time, this year triggering fines of nearly $20,000. The plant also will need repairs that could easily reach $100,000, according to information provided by town officials…