New uses for old nuclear plant

  • By Robin Mcginnis / The Chronicle
  • Sunday, March 26, 2006 9:00pm
  • Business

ELMA – It’s hard to keep quiet in a nuclear-power cooling tower. Stan Ratcliff has given enough tours of the Satsop Development Park near Elma to know the drill.

“From preschool students to Army generals, they all do the same thing,” Ratcliff said. “They clap or yell.”

The reverberation within the 500-foot concrete tower gives even a casual conversation a unique twist as sound bounces around the 3-foot-thick walls.

But the two cooling towers at Satsop weren’t meant for an auditory experiment. They’re relics of a failed multibillion-dollar energy project that was never used or completed.

And it’s the abandoned infrastructure that Barbara Hins-Turner, executive director for the Center of Excellence for Energy Technology at Centralia Community College, wants to use to train future workers for the power generation industry.

The energy industry will need as many as 10,000 replacement workers as baby boomers start to retire in the next five to eight years, according to Hins-Turner.

“Satsop makes so much sense,” she said.

High costs and concerns about nuclear safety forced the Washington Public Power Supply System to abandon Satsop in the early 1980s.

Ratcliff now works for the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority, the agency the state created to manage the site after its failure because the plant was too expensive to dismantle. Bob Guenther, president of the Thurston-Lewis County Labor Council, brought the idea of converting Satsop into a regional training center to Hins-Turner last fall, she said.

For Guenther, who worked as a mechanic at the Centralia Steam-Electric Plant for 34 years, opportunities for training at the Satsop park are limitless. Students would have access to 250-ton overhead cranes, a like-new maintenance repair shop, expensive valves, pumps, electrical breakers, and even 1,800 acres of underground tunnels for safety and confined space rescue training, he said.

“You can do distance learning for a year, but you have to pinch your finger, stub your toe and make mistakes,” Guenther said. “That’s when you really learn.”

The presentation to the Pacific Mountain Workforce Development Council, which works to promote employment throughout in Lewis, Thurston, Grays Harbor, Mason and Pacific counties, was to help further emphasize the project’s region-wide approach.

“The real goal is to create a standard, statewide program,” Hins-Turner said.

The program’s curriculum was developed by 10 members from various energy utilities throughout the region, including the Lewis County Public Utility District, TransAlta, Puget Sound Energy and Tacoma Power.

The industry-driven model would have use in training workers throughout the Northwest, according to Mike Kennedy, executive director for the five-county work force development council.

“It’s just good business sense,” he said. “It’s a mothballed, nonfunctioning power plant, and it would get some practical use.”

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