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MTAB Members Hold Meeting Al Fresco

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

MTAB members and a small audience persevered, holding their meeting outside when they couldn’t get into the Moapa Community Center building last week. No one had a key to the building.

It was a chilly and brief meeting for the Moapa Town Advisory Board (MTAB) on Tuesday, January 31. Board members gathered at the Moapa Community Center building but couldn’t gain access to the usual meeting room because no one had a key to enter.

Undaunted, the board members and other attendees repaired to a set of picnic tables in the portico behind the building and proceeded quickly through their agenda.

Chief on that agenda was a report from representatives of NV Energy about upcoming activities at the Reid Gardner Power Station in Moapa. Interim Plant Director Jason Hammons explained that the plant is currently running round the clock in order to burn all of the coal currently in inventory. Once that coal is expended, Reid Gardner will be shut down for good. That is expected to happen near the end of this month, Hammons said.

At that point, crews will begin demolition on all of the structures at the plant, a process which is expected to take the next 18 months to two years.
MTAB member Bob Lyman asked if the company had considered simply mothballing the plant to keep it functional in case there was a change in political attitudes on the subject of coal power.
“No, the decision is that we will be closing it down completely,” Hammons said. “It is actually a matter of state law that we do so. Senate Bill 123 was clear in its mandate that we are required to retire 812 megawatts of coal generation in southern Nevada. But the decision is also consistent with the general direction of our company toward renewable resources.”

The NV Energy company is owned by Berkshire Hathaway Energy which has 12 million customers worldwide.
Hammons said that the plant is currently down to about 43 employees on site. With the shutdown, that number is expected to decrease again. A few will remain to continue the process of demolition. But most employees will be transitioned to other plants in the region, he said.
“The good news is that there have been no lay-offs of employees through this process,” Hammons said. “And there are none expected.”

Hammons praised the work of the plant employees in recent years as they have had to face unfamiliar conditions at the plant. Units 1, 2 and 3 at Reid Gardner were retired in 2014 to comply with the state law. Unit 4 was scheduled to be decommissioned at the end of this year, but the timeframe was moved up to the end of February, through a company request to the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada last fall.

Despite all of that change, the plant employees had maintained a remarkable safety record, Hammons said. The plant staff has not had a lost time accident or OSHA recordable safety event since 2012.
“An OSHA recordable event can be as little as a scratch on a finger where the employee goes to the doctor and gets something prescribed to treat it,” Hammons explained. “So having a record like that in a plant like this one, which has been under so much change, is truly remarkable. It really speaks to the caliber of our employees.”

NV Energy Director of Environmental Remediation Matt Johns talked to board members about the environmental efforts that would be made to reclaim the site after decommissioning. This would include cleaning up the site of all its buildings and removing any impacted soil. A major focus would also be placed on closing and reclaiming a number of remaining settling ponds that are on the site.

Johns emphasized that the environmental work of studying, monitoring and mitigating impacts at the site would continue for many years to come.
“Our job is to get all of this work of remediation done and get the site ready for some future use; whatever that might be,” Johns said. “We are looking to get the site to a stable, long-term state.”

Board members expressed appreciation for the work being done to reclaim the property.
“Thank you for your report,” said MTAB member Tim Watkins. “It certainly appears that you are taking care of these communities through this process and we appreciate that.”

In other business, board members voted to adopt a revised set of bylaws that were before them.

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