Besides Three Mile Island Unit One in Middletown and Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in York County, Exelon operates the Limerick Generating Station in Montgomery County. The $12 billion stock transfer would create the nation’s largest power generation company.


Sources said more than 20 intervenors are scheduled to present expert testimony during a PUC hearing next month in Philadelphia.


Many of the parties will be opposing the transaction or asking the commissioners to impose conditions on it, according to Irwin “Sonny” Popowsky, the state consumer advocate.


Popowsky said the merger poses fundamental questions about the impact on competition and the potential for rate hikes. Meanwhile, he said, labor unions are concerned about possible wage and benefit losses while environmentalists worry that staffing cuts could jeopardize public safety and the environment.


Kellie Szabo, who spoke for Exelon from its Chicago headquarters, said earlier this month that any change in staffing “would not have any impact on safety” or the environment.


“I can say emphatically that safety is the first priority” for the company at all of its power generating plants, she said.


“There are no reductions scheduled” at TMI or Peach Bottom, she added.


PUC held public input hearings on the merger proposal last month.


Spokeswoman Jill Helsel said the commission will decide by the end of the year whether to OK the utilities’ plans.




Big deal




While much is riding on the PUC, the deal must also be approved by the Board of Utilities in New Jersey, where 400 nuclear power plant job cuts were announced recently.


According to published reports, Newark-based PSEG would phase out half the jobs through voluntary buyouts at its Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants and cut the rest through attrition and layoffs.


The reductions were expected to be completed before the acquisition. PSEG and Exelon together will shrink its workforce by about five percent to roughly 28,000 employees, said Scott J. Rubin, an attorney who represents the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other labor unions throughout Pennsylvania.


Rubin said Pennsylvania will lose some 250 jobs, including 100 from Philadelphia-based PECO Energy, a subsidiary of PSEG.


Nuclear watchdog Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island-Alert contends that TMI, the site of a partial meltdown accident in March, 1979, and Peach Bottom cannot afford to lose any more permanent employees.


Because Exelon cut more than 200 workers after its operator, AmerGen Energy, took over TMI Unit 1 from GPU Nuclear in 1999, Epstein claims “they’re already understaffed” and ill-prepared to cope with emergencies. In July, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued violations after discovering that half of Three Mile Island’s 364 emergency responders had missed a required annual refresher course.


Industry officials have said that the lapse was a technical oversight, and that workers could have handled any actual emergency.


Also last month, the PUC voted to remove Epstein as an intervenor in the merger case because he does not live in PECO service territory. But Epstein said TMI-Alert is intervening before the NRC to oppose the transfer of licenses from AmerGen and Peach Bottom to Exelon.


Each corporate realignment has distanced the link between the power plants and their controllers, Epstein said. “I never think it’s a good idea for the owner of a nuclear plant to reside in a different area code.”