AEHI explains its plan for the plant

Don Gillispie, chairman and CEO of Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc., is hoping to convince the Elmore County Planning and Zoning Commission to rezone approximately 1,345 acres of Agricultural A zoned property to Heavy Industrial to build a nuclear power plant on the land.

The site, located southwest of Old Highway 30, approximately four miles west of Hammett, is the company's second choice after finding fault lines at its original site in Oywhee County.

Gillispie said he asked Elmore County officials last summer if they wouldn't mind being his "Plan B" and since he found support in the county, going across the river made sense.

"I think Elmore County is more aggressive in the standpoint from progress than Owyhee County," Gillispie said. "The people here want to see growth and development. They want to see high-paying jobs.

"We found such good support from Elmore County when we found Owyhee County not being acceptable we thought we had good support over here from the development that will come from this that it made sense to go across the river instead of starting over in a whole different area.

"The people over here had heard about it, read about it and knew about it. And the commissioners indicated they were supportive of it last summer if we came to Elmore County."

Gillispie estimates it will cost $4.2 billion to build the 1,600-megawatt plant that would begin operating in 2016 at the earliest. He said he has an open contract with the land owners to purchase the land after it has been vetted.

Gillispie, who grew up on a farm in Virginia without running water or electricity, had only been to Idaho to hunt and fish with friends before forming AEHI. He now lives in Eagle and said he picked this area to build the plant because a small group of Owhyee County farmers asked him to build the plant because they couldn't afford the lift price of electricity so they wanted to build a power plant and contacted him after finding his company online.

The plant, according to Gillispie, will consume about 100,000 gallons of water a day, although he said his company would have water rights on 10 million gallons a day.

The majority of the water used for cooling the reactor would be used for irrigation on nearby farm land.

"The rest we're going to recycle and really not use it and put it back on the farm and use it for irrigation," Gillispie said. "Anything we use for cooling will be used for irrigation, so it won't be lost."

The water would come from the Snake River into a pond to be used as the cooling source. Water would be drawn out of the pond as needed and put back into another pond after it is used. There the 95- to 100-degree water would be pumped onto farm land.

Gillispie believes the warmer water will allow for an additional season of crops, but admits it's never been tried before.

"We're doing a lot of stuff that's never been done as it relates to the crop aspect, so usually (for nuclear plants) this large, you see water pumped back into the river or evaporated into the air," Gillispie said. "We're going to try to keep using it the way it's been used, so it's not wasted if you will."

Since the river's water rights have already been committed and Gillispie will have to acquire existing water rights, the plant will not take any additional water out of the river.

The AREVA Evolution Power Reactor Gillispie plans to use will have a huge dome he described as "a couple of hundred feet high" surrounded by shorter buildings.

He insists the plant's lighting won't affect the public observatory at the Bruneau Sand Dune State Park. Gillispie believes a berm on the property will block most views of the plant from the highway.

Gillispie estimates the plant will cost $4.2 million to build, including application and legal fees.

He said 20 percent of the money will come from investors and the remaining 80 percent will come from loans.

He is building the plant without tax dollars and speculating he can sell power cheaper than his competitors.

"People say it's going to cost too much, the answer is 'Why do you care?' It's not your money," Gillispie said. "We're borrowing the money and getting investors, not taking money from Idaho ratepayers."

Gillispie said power companies in Idaho will have the first chance to purchase the plant's power. He said he has been in discussions with Avista, Mid-American and Idaho Power. He said Avista and Mid-America showed interest in buying power while Idaho Power is waiting to see if the plant is successful before continuing discussions with his company.

He is confident Idaho Power will purchase power if it's offered at a competitive rate.

"The truth is with power, if you can build it and build it effectively, this large amount, you know the old saying 'if you build it, they will come,' it's similar," he said. "We're not too concerned about people wanting to buy the power."

He said companies from out of state have also shown interest as well but maintains Idaho power companies will have first priority for the plant's power.

AEHI hopes to eventually build three to six reactors at the site and sell the additional power outside of the state to bring additional income into the state, a process Gillispie compared to selling Idaho potatoes out of state.

Gillispie said one reactor can provide enough power for every home in Idaho three times over. The power generated from one and a half of the reactors would be enough to meet all of Idaho's demand so Gillispie said the company would be able to meet all of Idaho's demand with excessive power to sell out of state.

However, if the plant is built and a 100 percent of the plant's power is sold to out-of-state companies, Gillispie said the group of Owhyee County farmers that asked him to first build the plant would still be taken care of.

"If nothing else, we can set up a co-op and sell the power locally," he said. "We don't need the power companies. I can set up a co-op right here in this area and sell the power directly to the farmers here, without the power companies if they don't want to cooperate. I don't think that will be the case and I don't think I'll have to do that. That's an option. I'm not going to abandon those people.

"I'm not doing this for the classic business reasons, I'm doing this to help people and the people who helped me, which are these investors here in Idaho. I'm going to make sure they get taken care of."

Gillispie said he started the company to help the country with energy and to help the economy.

After retiring in 2005 from the energy business and running nuclear plants, he said he started looking at the country's energy situation getting worse while prices increased.

He didn't think it made sense for the technology to not be used so he decided to form a company with retired colleagues of his.

"I contacted colleges of mine and said, 'Why don't we start a company? We're playing a lot of golf and tennis, why don't we stop playing golf and tennis and see if we can help the country? Let's see if we can start a company to bring some energy'," Gillispie said.

"None of us take a salary. We all do this to pay back and to use our experience we've gained over 35, 40 years of business. There's no company like us, no company this size has ever taken on a project like this.

"We have a lot of experience doing this, probably, more than anybody. The only thing we don't have is the big bucks that the large utilities come out of the gate with. That's our challenge, fundraising, not expertise."

Gillispie said the young company couldn't afford the board the company has if they had to pay them.

Construction of the plant couldn't begin until 2012 at the earliest and a study by a Portland-based consultant firm, Johnson Gardner, LLC, showed the four-year construction phase would have a huge financial impact on Elmore and Owyhee counties.

According to the numbers Gillispie reported in the company's rezoning application, 3,785 jobs a year would be created (during construction); an estimated $558 million would be created in local payroll and labor income with another $205 million in local ripple-effect payroll impact; the average wage for construction on-site is estimated at nearly $56,000, while manufacturing and component assembly employment is estimated to average $67,000; and the ripple economic impact of construction will create an additional $826 million in statewide payroll over four years, supporting 1,754 full-time jobs annually.

The application also reported that once the reactor is built, it would create approximately 500 jobs at the reactor and another 500 jobs elsewhere in Idaho with most of them located in Elmore County; facility operations will create $40 million in annual labor income for reactor personnel and nearly $17 million in ripple permanent, annual new labor income; and annual wages of an average of $80,000 to plant employees and $33,536 in industries indirectly affected. The plant would contribute $2.6 billion to the state's economy and produce $74 million during operation.

The plant would pay $53.2 million in local property taxes a year. For comparison, Elmore County's entire budget is $14.3 million.

Out of the 500 jobs created by the plant, Gillispie said about half of them would be non-degree high school graduate jobs, approximately 100 would be engineers with degrees and about a 100 of them would be two-year tech school-level jobs.

Gillispie intends to hire everybody from the local area, although he expects that initially he may have to hire out of the local area for the more advanced jobs. He said the company needs to work with schools in the area to get the required training, and trained individuals, in the pipeline.

"Our objective is to hire everybody from the local area," Gillispie said ."We always try to staff locally. It makes sense because you have less turnover and get better support so that will be our objective."

Gillispie said the company should be able to hire all of the high school-level jobs, a lot of the two-year tech school jobs and a handful of the engineers from the area.

Gillispie said he has an on-paper agreement with Idaho State University to use their training to initially help fill some of the two-year tech positions.

At the end of the plant's 60-year life, Gillispie said the plant would be decommissioned and the land will look as it did before the plant was built. Fees are collected from sale of the plant's power to fund that.