Need for workers may power new project

By Robin McGinnis

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 three-foot-thick walls.

But the two cooling towers at Satsop weren’t meant for an auditory experiment: They’re relics of a failed multi-billion dollar energy project that was never used nor completed.
And it’s the abandoned infrastructure that Barbara Hins-Turner, executive director for the Center of Excellence for Energy Technology at Centralia 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.

Construction stopped at the 1,800-acre site, leaving one of the reactors 75 percent completed, according to Ratcliff, a former submarine reactor operator who was hired to work at the facility in 1981.

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.

“When I saw it, I thought, ‘This is turnkey. Why is it sitting empty? We can deal with it being remote,’ ” she said on Thursday afternoon during a presentation to the Pacific Mountain Workforce Development Council at the Satsop site.
The sound of a lone trumpeter playing the national anthem reverberates through the vast and unfinished remains of a 500-foot concrete nuclear-power cooling tower at the Satsop Development Park near Elma. Keith Chamberlain, Pacific Mountain Workforce Development Council board member and past chairperson, demonstrates the marvel of sound and acoustics on Thursday afternoon.
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.”

Guenther said he even had a use for the two cooling towers: high-angle rescue training.
“Students could rappel off a 500-foot vertical plain,” he said. “Where else would there be anything like that available?”

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.

She added that collaboration within the community college system, including Grays Harbor and Pierce counties, was helping to make this a reality.

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, non-functioning power plant, and it would get some practical use.”

In addition to complimenting Grays Harbor College’s natural resources program, a training center at Satsop would help in the area’s diversification, according to Ed Brewster, the Aberdeen community college’s president.

“Grays Harbor as a community has suffered major losses with the wood products industry,” he said. “Energy is certainly a possibility for the county.”

THE FULL AMOUNT OF FUNDING NEEDED to refit the former nuclear power plant and add dormitories for students is unknown.

Last December, Hins-Turner applied for, but didn’t receive, a $15 million Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development grant for the project.

 “It was kind of (a) pie-in-the-sky amount,” she said. “(The grant) wasn’t funded at the national level, but the governor did select it, at the state level, as one of the top projects.”

Hins-Turner said she was applying for a grant with the National Science Foundation, not so much for the financial backing, but for the organization’s reputation.

“It could help us get the program into the high schools,” she said.

Jim Walton, president of Centralia College, said he doesn’t know how many students might attend the training facility, but added that energy generation facilities’ family-wage jobs tend to attract large numbers.

“I think students will come from far and wide to take advantage of the training as it becomes more well known in the region,” he said.

While the program is still in the planning stages, Hins-Turner is optimistic of someday running a training center with industries participating in apprenticeships.

“I don’t want to do anything on a shoestring. I want to do it right,” she said. “But with all this synergy, something’s going to happen.”

SATSOP DEVELOPMENT PARK isn’t entirely unused. About 20 companies have an office in the site’s business park, according to Ratcliff.

In what was supposed to be a security building for the nuclear plant, rows of mini-lockers store computer servers for various companies.

“All the Internet traffic in Grays Harbor County goes through that building,” Ratcliff said of the site’s extensive fiber optic cable network.

The former reactor operator works as the PDA’s liaison, selling pieces off pieces from the original plant, such as copper wire and nickel tubing.

So far, the efforts have earned the PDA, which is a non-taxing entity, about $1.6 million, according to Ratcliff.

The site is so vast that his business transactions wouldn’t affect an incoming training center, Radcliff said, which he sees as a project that just makes sense.

“I think it’s a shoe-in. It’s a nuclear energy plant, but if you just drop the nuclear off, and it’s an energy plant,” he said. “It’s a good tool to show how things interrelate to each other.”

•••
Robin McGinnis covers business issues for The Chronicle. She may be reached at (360) 807-8231, or by e-mail at rmcginnis@chronline.com.


Energy research summit planned

Centralia College’s Center of Excellent for Energy Technology will hold an energy research summit on June 21 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Satsop Development Park near Elma.

The event will feature break-out sessions, addressing the future of energy research; education, economic and work force development; industry’s skill standards; and energy education in high schools.

To reserve a spot or for more information, contact:

Cindy Mann
(360) 360-9391 ext. 280.

Adam Amato / The Chronicle