A Small Circle of Companies Seeks Control of Nuclear Reactors

By AGIS SALPUKAS, New York Times, March 6, 2026

PLYMOUTH, Mass. -- The property that was put on the market last summer was a nuclear plant -- the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station here -- and that alone might have made it a tough sell.

For one, nuclear energy has been very unpopular since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. And the opening of electricity markets in states like Massachusetts adds to the financial risks of running a nuclear plant: the costs of plant shutdowns, for instance, can no longer be passed along, with the blessing of regulators, to customers. And the operator no longer has a monopoly.

For these reasons, Pilgrim's owner, Boston Edison Co., had said that if a buyer could not be found, the plant would be shut down and decommissioned sooner rather than later. For Plymouth, a town of nearly 50,000 and home of Plymouth Rock, the loss of its biggest employer would have been a huge blow.

So the 670 managers and employees of the Pilgrim plant were understandably nervous when teams of executives from other utility companies toured the plant to see if they wanted to make a bid. The floors and walls of the plant glistened; the telephones were even polished by hand. Some of the maintenance and operating workers wore ties and dress shirts for a time.

"Until a buyer was found, you did not know what the future held," recalled Frank Clifford, a service reactor operator at Pilgrim.

While the offers did not exactly pour in, two bids were eventually made for the plant. EntergyCorp., a huge utility based in New Orleans, was the winner with a $80 million bid. It was just the second sale of a nuclear plant in the United States.

It's a buyers' market, but the fact that there is a market at all in nuclear plants is a sign of how deregulation is reshaping the power industry. Entergy and companies like the Peco EnergyCo. and Dominion Resourcesare in the forefront of a group of bargain-basement shoppers who see remaining value in nuclear energy.

Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars or more to build a new power plant capable of generating the same amount of electricity, they are able to buy older nuclear plants for tens of millions -- a mere fraction of their book value. (The last reactor to be built in the United States was ordered in 1973.)

These companies, which own more than one nuclear plant, say they have developed the skill and size to run nuclear plants more efficiently. The possibility of costly operating shutdowns does not frighten them, they say, because they will have the needed expertise, manpower and equipment available should a problem arise.

And the price is so cheap that it pays to deal with the generally higher costs of operating nuclear power plants compared with that of running other electricity sources.

Nuclear plants in newly open markets like Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey are particularly attractive. Under deregulation, a number of the utilities in those states are shrinking to become transmission companies.

They will concentrate on the delivery of electricity and on servicing business and residential customers. Utilities like Consolidated Edison Co. of New York, for example, will buy power at the lowest price from pools where companies like Entergy, Dominion and Peco will sell power.

The buyers of nuclear plants contend they can thrive in such open markets. When the plants are run well, they can compete on price with low-cost plants that run on hydropower, coal and natural gas. And local nuclear plants are particularly attractive compared with power plants outside the region, which face more expensive transmission costs.

"People who are buying the nuclear plants are very smart," said Robert Rubin, a utility analyst with Bear, Stearns. Despite the image of nuclear power as an industry with no future, he said, it still has many years of life yet.

Entergy, which will have five nuclear plants once the Pilgrim acquisition closes, has identified nuclear generation as having tremendous potential.

Many utilities, however, especially those with only one nuclear plant, see only potential liabilities. At the same time, regulators in Massachusetts and elsewhere have been pushing utilities to dispose of their generation plants to help open the market to competition.

For those utilities that are transforming themselves into transmission companies, state regulators often make allowances for their nuclear plants because of the uncertainty over whether there would be buyers. But most utilities have not needed much prodding to sell.

Rubin estimates that 25 to 30 plants will soon be put on the market and will either change hands or be shut down. In a decade, he predicted, most of the nation's 103 operating reactors will be owned by just a handful of companies.

In what may be the next such deal, the two units of the Nine Mile Point nuclear plant, which employs 1,350 workers, are up for sale. Niagara Mohawk PowerCorp. of Syracuse owns one unit. A consortium of utilities, which includes Niagara Mohawk, owns the other. They are in negotiations with Amergen, a joint venture formed by Peco Energy, a utility based in Philadelphia, and British Energyof Edinburgh, one of Britain's largest generator of electricity.

The fate of the plant, on the shores of Lake Ontario, is causing apprehension in Scriba, N.Y., a town of about 8,000.

"Is the new owner going to be a good citizen in our community?" asked Norman Seiter, a lawyer for the town board of Scriba. The two units pay about 85 percent of the property taxes of the town and 39 percent of Oswego County's taxes.

If the units are sold, as expected, for less than their book values, the town would be under pressure to reduce the plant's valuation sharply, causing property tax revenues from the operations to fall.

In July, Amergen was the buyer in the first nuclear plant sale in the United States, agreeing to acquire the functioning unit of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of the nation's worst nuclear accident. The seller was GPUInc., a utility that serves parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Amergen has also received the exclusive right to negotiate an agreement to buy the Vermont Yankee Nuclear plant in Vernon, Vt., owned by a group of 13 New England utilities.

But not every nuclear plant put on the market will end up with a buyer. Some plants have been so ridden with problems or have such complex ownership and regulatory hurdles that they are likely to be decommissioned early because they cannot be counted on to offer reliable power at competitive prices.

Last year, GPU, for example, tried to sell its Oyster Creek plant, situated about 35 miles north of Atlantic City, N.J., but talks broke down, and it was going to be shut. Now, the sales of the Three Mile Island unit and the Pilgrim plant have encouraged GPU to make another effort to find a buyer for Oyster Creek.

Peco had looked at the Maine Yankee plant in Wiscasset, Maine, but backed off. That plant will be shut down for good.

The prospect of a permanent shutdown worries people in Scriba the most. "We want these plants to stay here and keep operating," Seitersaid. If buyers are not found, he noted, "we will still have a nuclear site in our backyard with the waste being stored for some time."

As more nuclear plants come on the market or are decommissioned, similar concerns are likely to be felt by dozens of communities the next few years.

For Boston Edison, a subsidiary of BEC Energy, the decision that its one nuclear plant would not be a part of its future was made after a review two years ago. The utility decided that Pilgrim should be run by a company that had a number of such plants and could take advantage of economies of scale, said Carl Gustin, the senior vice president for corporate communications at Boston Edison.

"It was the best way for Pilgrim to keep operating in the future to have an owner committed to nuclear power," he said.

Entergy got a bargain, industry analysts say. Of its total bid of $80 million, $67 million was for nuclear fuel. This meant that in effect Entergy paid only $13 million for a plant whose book value is about $700 million. A trust fund of $466 million to offset the cost of decommissioning, whenever that should be needed, is also being passed along to Entergy.

The company bought the Pilgrim plant at a time it was running at 97 percent of its capacity and producing 670 megawatts of power -- enough to serve a small city.

But the plant has been troubled in the past. For a time, it had one of the worst operating records in the nation. In 1986, the plant was already under criticism from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when it suffered two shutdowns because of equipment problems.

Pilgrim remained shut for two years while it underwent an extensive overhaul. Adm. Ralph G. Bird, an outside expert with a background in nuclear submarines, took charge and put in new management and tightened operations and safety procedures.

Entergy has succeeded in turning around other troubled plants. Two of its plants,Arkansas Nuclear One and River Bend in Louisiana had particularly poor operating records in the late 1980s. The plants, which had been operating at as low as 60 percent of capacity, have been operating at an 88 percent level recently.

"You are taking a risk when you assume these assets," Mike Bellamy, the vice president of operations at Pilgrim for Entergy Nuclear said in an interview. "If they are run well and you buy them at a good price, the opportunity is there to make a nice profit."

In Plymouth, the sale of Pilgrim Nuclear "has brought real mixed feelings," said Robert Bradley, the office manager at the Pilgrim Sands Motel, whose house overlooks the plant. "There have been times when people were real nervous and wanted it shut down. It has also been a real financial boon to the town."

Entergy is not expected to make major changes at the plant, Bellamy of Pilgrim said, adding that earlier job cuts had left the plant with a lean and efficient work force.

Still, workers and managers may have to change their way of thinking in a newly competitive industry.

Employees had the attitude that "Mother Boston Edison will take care of me," said Cristine Maimaron, a manager and an important member of the marketing team that sold the plant. "It was hard to make the break."