Ray and Irene Zukley of Zion, Illinois were forced to sell this Lake Michigan beach cottage to make way for Zion Nuclear Station back in the late 60s. The Zukley's and other Zion residents hoped the plant would last for at least forty years, but after fits and starts, it closed fifteen years early. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
America has a new flirtation with
nuclear power. Utility companies are fanning
out across the nation to set up shop. And
they’ve given the government more applications
for new nuclear plants than they have for
decades. Many towns fell under the spell of
nuclear power in the past, but some power plants
stopped running decades earlier than planned,
and towns are stuck with what’s left behind.
Shawn Allee profiles one town’s tarnished
relationship with nuclear power:
Transcript
America has a new flirtation with
nuclear power. Utility companies are fanning
out across the nation to set up shop. And
they’ve given the government more applications
for new nuclear plants than they have for
decades. Many towns fell under the spell of
nuclear power in the past, but some power plants
stopped running decades earlier than planned,
and towns are stuck with what’s left behind.
Shawn Allee profiles one town’s tarnished
relationship with nuclear power:
Irene and Ray Zukley have been together so long, they finish each others sentences.
Especially when I ask how things were in Zion, Illinois back in the 60s.
Zuckley: “The factories were getting downgraded.”
Allee: “What were those?”
Zuckley: “It was the curtain factory, the cookie factory, chocolates and Zion fig
bars.”
But just then, the power company said it would spend hundreds of millions on a nuclear
power plant.
Irene Zukley says most people welcomed it.
“Ray and I never worried about it, you know we just wanted progress is what we
wanted. When you think of having taxes lowered for everybody in Zion, that made
you feel, what else would come in and do that?”
Irene and Ray Zukley were forced to sell their family’s beach cottage to make room for
Zion reactor number one.
Beachfront neighbors did the same.
But, like the Zukleys predicted, taxes and jobs rolled into Zion.
It was supposed to be a forty year windfall.
But it didn’t last.
When you visit the power plant, it’s nearly empty.
“What we’ve got here is what used to be a full-fledged control room.”
Ron Schuster runs what’s left of the Zion nuclear power plant.
Once, it had more than eight hundred employees.
Now, Schuster and about fifty workers help manage the regional power grid.
They also monitor radioactive spent fuel waste.
The generators have been offline since 1997.
“There were large pieces of equipment essential to making electricity that would
have needed total replacement going forward. We’re talking significant dollars so
the economic decision by the board of directors that Zion station would go into safe-
store mode.”
That means the power plant and Zion have been in limbo for ten years.
The radioactive fuel is still on site, but the plant provides no power, few jobs and a
fraction of the property taxes.
Delaine Rogers is Zion’s economic development director. She says the town didn’t plan
on this.
“You’re in a community that has welcomed you. We haven’t had an antagonistic
relationship. They’re not going to close. But they did. And it took 17 million dollars
of our local revenues. We were facing losing all our arts and music and sports in our
schools. How do you fund police the police department. How do you fix potholes? It
was a very scary time.”
Lately, the power company’s gone back and forth about when it will decommission, or
dismantle, the power plant.
It could be done ten years from now or it could take decades more.
But even when most of the buildings are gone, there’s still the radioactive spent fuel.
“They’re just going to leave it. They’re going to put a football-sized concrete pad
filled with 80-90 casks of stored fuel on site, above ground. Tell me how you get a
private developer to think residential or retail. I’m not buying the first condo.”
Dozens of towns are stuck in relationships with dormant nuclear power plants.
Delaine Rogers says the town of Zion is in the same position.
She won’t call it a bad relationship, but says it sure would be nice to know exactly where
it’s going, or when it will be over.
For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.
