Millstone built us a new bridge. Millstone replaced the leaky roof on our food pantry. Millstone built a playscape for disabled kids.
From some of the testimony last week, you'd hardly know that the Millstone nuclear power plant was up for a water discharge permit and not the Rotary Club's corporate citizenship award.
Elected leaders lined up to gush about what a great neighbor the nuke plant is. How they lease the East Lyme police station to the town for $1 a year. How they dropped $100,000 on a new roof for the United Way Food Center. How they bought a new vehicle for the town dog catcher.
After a while, it started to sound like a recitation of how an out-of-state energy giant bought and sold local officialdom.
Millstone isn't up for the good neighbor award. It's seeking to renew its water discharge permit, a license to suck 2.2 billion gallons of water a day from Niantic Bay to cool its reactors, then flush it back into Long Island Sound 10 to 20 degrees warmer.
The process kills billions of fish and fish eggs. They're swallowed and pulverized by pumps, devastating what was once a vital habitat for winter flounder and other species.
Environmental groups want the state to make Millstone install a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water and could reduce fish kills by 98 percent.
Town officials who testified at a hearing in Old Lyme last week paid lip service to the fish, but waxed lyrical about the good deeds of Millstone and its corporate owner, Dominion of Virginia. And about how forcing them to build more eco-friendly cooling towers could totally ruin their views from the beach.
Millstone Power Station's been running off a water discharge permit that expired in 1997. Under the federal Clean Water Act, power plants must renew permits every five years. That ensures they stay current with evolving technologies and clean water regulations.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has allowed Millstone to run using an "emergency" permit for the past 11 years. That essentially gives them a "license to pollute," according to Roger Reynolds, senior attorney with Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
"An old permit is a license to use outdated, environmentally destructive technology," Reynolds says. "This is rich tidal water with billions of organisms being sucked up and killed each and every day. This needs to be addressed."
Millstone's two working reactors generate 2,100 megawatts of power, enough to power 500,000 million homes here and around New England. Two years ago, the DEP issued a tentative approval of Millstone's permit renewal which included a cost-benefit analysis that weighed how much a closed-loop cooling system would cost the nuclear plant against its ecological benefits. The environmentalists cried foul.
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