Dan's Papers - June 27, 2008 - Shoreham Reopening?

A generation later, so few people remember the wild and passionate battle to stop the Shoreham Nuclear Plant that the announcement that LIPA is considering reopening it and forming an advisory committee to study the matter, passed by without even a ripple.

That this story has simply passed out of the consciousness of this community (just ask 10 people - six won't know what you are talking about) is an amazement to me. It so damaged the reputation of what was then the Long Island Lighting Company that the company got thrashed, torn apart, taken over temporarily by Governor Cuomo to stop a financial collapse that would have darkened the homes of Long Islanders and thrown this place into a deep recession, and finally, ordered the plant bulldozed to the ground.

Guess what? They never did. Here is the story, in brief, of this amazing life-altering catastrophe.

In 1965, LILCO, as it was then known (the debacle was so deep that even its name got changed to LIPA) announced that it would build three nuclear plants on the north shore of eastern Long Island. Two would be in Jamesport on the North Fork, and the third would be a little closer to New York City, in Shoreham. Long Island would be fossil fuel-free by 1970, and the most scientifically advanced community in the United States.

The initial cost for each power plant would be $65 million. Furthermore, the president of LILCO, Bob Uhl, announced that LILCO would, with all the technological resources here on Long Island, build these plants themselves. There would be no need to hire an outside firm familiar with building nuclear plants.

Seven years later, in 1973, after three years of hearings, plans were approved to build the first of the three plants, in Shoreham. It would be operational not in 1970, but in 1976, and it would cost $400 million. Its total output would be 820 megawatts. They might only need one plant in Jamesport.

During the next three years, construction at Shoreham proceeded by fits and starts. Not only was LILCO showing itself to be incompetent at building a nuclear plant, but the federal government kept changing the rules on what a new nuclear plant ought to look like in order not to spill active radioactivity out into the atmosphere. Occasionally, parts of the plant had to be knocked down and rebuilt entirely. On numerous occasions, entire concrete walls had to be jackhammered out. The cost would be $1 billion, then it would be $2 billion. And, it seemed, every month or two, the rates for electricity would be jacked up to handle the increased costs of building Shoreham. Soon, the date to open the plant was in 1981.

By 1976, the rates paid by Long Islanders for electricity had gone through the roof. They were paying the highest rates for electricity anywhere in the United States by far. Even Con Ed executives in New York City were amazed.

In addition, with all the building and tearing down and rebuilding, the public, by this time, had completely lost confidence in LILCO's ability to build the plant. There were speeches. Calls for Bob Uhl to resign. Demands that construction be suspended. Employees at the plant even held press conferences (and then got fired) to announce that they were moving off the island with their families to avoid what surely would soon happen - which was that Shoreham would blow up.

Demostrators and protesters appeared at the chain link fence and gate of Shoreham, which guarded the 58-acre site along Route 25A. Behind the fence were woods leading down to Long Island Sound. You couldn't see Shoreham from the road. But you knew it was in there.

On June 3, 1979, more than 50,000 protestors, the largest group of people ever to demonstrate against something on Long Island, assembled at Shoreham, climbed the fences and ran toward the plant with signs and sticks. The police beat them with clubs and tear-gassed them. Order was finally restored. 571 people were arrested.

LILCO then began staging, as it turned out, fake brownouts and blackouts. People believed they were real because they were told by Uhl that it was so, that these blackouts and brownouts were necessary because LILCO was unable to provide power to the people because they had been unable to complete the plant on time. Turn off your air conditioners. Turn off your lights. We will try to keep the business disruptions to a minimum. But support the completion of the new plant.

Although now it seems it will cost about $5.2 billion to complete the plant. Sorry about that.

On January 21, 1984, LILCO announced that Shoreham was finished and ready to be opened. It had cost $6.1 billion. But Long Islanders and the State of New York refused to allow it to do so. They claimed that if they started it up it would explode, and nobody would be able to get off Long Island to save themselves.

(Around this time, Dan's Papers published a cartoon of the Montauk Lighthouse with a diving board at the edge of the cliff, and citizens obediently lined up for miles and miles behind it, waiting to use it.)

After a year of battling, the Federal Government ruled that LILCO could only open if they could show that Long Island could be safely evacuated if a leak occurred at the plant. A mock drill was held by local officials and led by LILCO security police at the plant and on main routes around Long Island on February 13, 1986. It was called a sham by those opposed to the plant. (It was called a success by the Nassau County Supervisor. Dan's Papers, thinking that if Nassau County liked Shoreham so much, maybe they ought to have it, called a local house-mover to ask what it would cost to move Shoreham to Mineola. He estimated it at $712 million. He won the bid. But it was never moved.)

Later that year, the Suffolk County Legislature voted 15 to 1 that LILCO had failed to show that an evacuation could be successfully accomplished. Bob Uhl resigned.

In 1987, the new president of LILCO, William Catascosinos, went into intense negotiations with Governor Mario Cuomo about who could possibly afford to bear the $6.1 billion cost of a power plant that would never open. Negotiations went on for years, and there was no hurry because there was no fear about the plant being opened at this point. Finally, in 1989, LILCO and the State of New York announced that the state would pick up much of the cost for the money spent, that LILCO would be replaced by a semi-public authority which would be called LIPA, and that the entire 58-acre complex of buildings would be torn down brick by brick until it was completely disassembled.

And then quite suddenly, on April 20 of that year, with the permission of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, LIPA powered up the nuclear plant to full power and for four hours, ran it at its full 820 megawatt maximum output without any problems whatsoever. The wires crackled. The energy went out. Then Shoreham was shut back down. It never ran again.

For years and years, I would occasionally drive down Route 25A past the deep woods, past the rusty chain link fence and the huge lock and chain on the entry gate, and imagine that the great woods were overgrowing whatever few pieces were left down on the Sound, where the former plant had been.

Guess what? It was never torn down. When Governor Cuomo got the three estimates about what it would cost to dismantle and found that the cheapest it was going to cost was another $1 billion, he decided maybe they ought to save the disassembling process for another day.

After last week's meeting establishing the new Shoreham Advisory Committee, some of the members of it, including the Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, the new LIPA Commissioner Kevin Law, members of the press and other local officials, got in their cars and drove over to the plant for a tour.

Everything was just as it was when it was abandoned nearly 15 years ago. Coffee cups still on the tables, calendars still on the walls. In that plant, it was still 1994, the last day of work there. You could even tell the date of when that was - June 10, 1994 - because Newsday for that day was still on one of the desks in the great control room. It was open, somebody said, to the comics.

Now here's the kicker. After all of this, it turns out that the one thing that the new Shoreham Advisory Board can NEVER decide is that Shoreham can once again become a nuclear plant. When the decision was made by Governor Cuomo to disassemble this place, another decision was made that Shoreham could never, never, never again be reopened as a nuclear plant. The woods were now sacred ground.

The Shoreham Advisory Board is therefore considering that it become a marina, or a restaurant or perhaps a hotel or housing development, or maybe a gas-fired power plant. (No rule about that.) After all, the Broadwater gasification project proposed for Long Island Sound is now dead. Um, here we have a power plant. Out in the ocean they have ships with liquefied gas on board thinking they might come into Long Island Sound some day. What do you think?