Plant Closing Hits New England Town Like A-Bomb

For years, a nuclear power plant brought Rowe all the things any small town in America could want--good roads, steady jobs and a solid tax base.

Now, with the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant about to close, residents are wondering how or if their scenic village will survive.

The end of an era came to Rowe, tucked away in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, recently when the Yankee Atomic Electric Co. announced that it was shutting down the country’s oldest nuclear power plant.

Yankee Rowe stopped generating power last October, four months after an anti-nuclear group charged that a key safety device, the reactor vessel, had become brittle with age and was thus incapable of containing a nuclear meltdown.

Yankee Atomic, a consortium of eight New England utilities, was in the process of answering questions about plant safety from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission when it decided the cost of doing so was too high.

And so it said the 31-year-old plant, set near the wooded banks of the Deerfield River just south of the Vermont border, would close.

The announcement shocked Rowe, where two-thirds of the town’s 346 residents work at the nuclear plant.

For more than a generation the plant, a five-story structure that dominates the hills around Rowe, has defined the existence of this community, whose bicentennial seal features a church, a sunrise and a symbol of the atom.

“Some people are very upset,” said James O’Brien, a town selectman (councilman). “It’s really more like losing a close friend.”

It was a very wealthy friend as well. The plant provided 29% of the town’s $1.8-million annual budget and pumped about $16 million into the local economy.

Rowe has been the envy of nearby towns for its well-paved streets, spacious parks, July 4 fireworks and well-financed town services. While budget cuts forced neighboring towns to close school libraries, Rowe residents got free tennis lessons. “This town has had a lot of advantages because of that plant, and we took it all--the best roads, a new town hall,” said Katherine Oliver, 70, who has lived in Rowe since 1946.

“Now it’s all going to be left back to the loggers, the (maple tree) tappers and the farmers,” she said with a shrug. “There’s going to be a lot of real estate for sale.”

Nobody even knows if there will be a town anymore when the plant is dismantled over the next few years.

Most town officials are also Yankee Rowe employees due to be laid off next January.

“It’s hard enough to get people to take these jobs,” O’Brien said. “Who knows what will happen once people start moving.”

Back in the late 1950s, residents were proud to get a bit of national limelight and to be part of what a local newspaper called the “first crack at harnessing the atom for civilian uses.”

Some residents have faced the closure with near disbelief.

“When they said it was closing (last October), I didn’t think that meant forever,” said Dorothy Lehr, owner of the Rowe Country Store, the only business in town.

Not everyone in town is sad to see it close. Douglas Wilson, a Unitarian Universalist minister and an opponent of nuclear power, has been living in the plant’s shadow for 18 years.

“Living in Rowe has been like living in Kuwait--we happen to have a kind of monopoly on a source of energy that makes the town very rich,” he said. “Now the town is going to return to a more normal existence and be like other towns.

“I think the situation is similar to that of the Electric Boat Co. in Connecticut,” said Wilson, referring to the big defense contractor in Groton, Conn., which has been forced to lay off 4,000 employees because of military budget cuts.

“It’s a tragedy for the people who lose their jobs, but nuclear submarines should never have been built in first place,” he said.