Yes to Nukes

As it plots a comeback in the United States, the nuclear power industry is cultivating a critical ally: organized labor.

The reasons are both practical and political. The industry's plan to build dozens of power plants requires thousands of workers, many of them with special skills that have become scarce during a more than 20-year hiatus in major construction. Good relations with unions could pave the way to steady labor supplies, smooth relations with workers, and more training programs to provide skilled labor.

Perhaps more important, the industry could use labor's clout with Democrats to help ensure support in Congress--and in a White House that could soon be home to a Democrat--for the substantial federal backing needed to help get plant construction rolling again.

Industry officials want Uncle Sam to reassure Wall Street banks, which have been skittish about investing in nuclear power, by guaranteeing repayment of tens of billions of dollars in loans.

In January, according to lobby disclosure filings, the Nuclear Energy Institute bolstered its already substantial K Street bench by hiring the new team of Michael Mathis and Chuck Harple. Until recently, they were, respectively, the government affairs director and the political director for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In the first three months of the year, the NEI paid the firm $30,000 to lobby on the federal loan guarantee issue. Separately, Constellation Energy Group, which hopes to build a third nuclear reactor at its Calvert Cliffs facility in Maryland, paid Mathis and Harple $10,000 to lobby on "funding, regulation, and permitting of enhanced nuclear and electric production."

"Mike and Chuck provide us with an additional conduit to these labor unions, and help get them to work with us," said Bob Powers, NEI's senior director of legislative programs. The two lobbyists also work with lawmakers' offices to coordinate meetings for the industry on Capitol Hill, he said.

Powers was legislative director of the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department before the NEI hired him in mid-2006 to join its in-house lobbying team. There are other labor links as well: Since at least 2003, the institute has elected three union presidents to its board of directors, and the Building and Construction Trades Department lists the NEI as an "industry partner."

The allure of nuclear power for labor is the massive number of jobs--as many as 71,300 during peak construction--that the industry says would be needed to build the 31 reactors on the drawing board. But none of the plants has received the required approvals and financing yet, so the promise of such jobs is just that--a promise.

Still, the industry is already trying to line up workers and suppliers. At the Building and Construction annual meeting in Washington in April, the union and Bechtel announced that they would ink a labor agreement by year's end for construction of Constellation Energy's proposed reactor.

The nuclear industry's ambitious plans and the corresponding jobs are unlikely to be realized without the federal loan guarantees. Over the objections of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives, Congress did approve $18.5 billion in guarantees last year under the auspices of the Energy Department. But the industry will likely need more than that amount, and many key details remain to be worked out. Among them: What a company getting loan guarantees should have to pay up front to compensate taxpayers for taking on the risk of default.

The program is supposed to pay for itself, but Autumn Hanna, senior program director at Taxpayers for Common Sense, says, "With DOE's record of being able to assess the true cost for risk, we have little faith that will happen." The group occasionally joins nearly a dozen environmental organizations opposed to expanding nuclear power generation that have been meeting weekly since the battle over the loan guarantees heated up late last year.

Reaching out to labor could help the nuclear industry counter the influence of these environmental and budget watchdog groups, many of which have ties to Democrats. It could also help balance the industry's historical tilt toward Republicans. In the 2004 election cycle, the NEI's political action committee gave three times as much money to Republican candidates as Democratic ones; in 2006, the ratio was 2-to-1. (So far in this election cycle, contributions are split evenly between candidates of both parties.)

The move could also compensate for some of the clout that the industry will lose with the retirement this year of a key advocate, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. Domenici is the ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a former chairman; he is also the ranking member on the Appropriations panel's Subcommittee on Energy and Water. Domenici is the former boss of the NEI's head of governmental affairs, Alex Flint.

This article appeared in the Saturday, May 3, 2008 edition of National Journal.

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