Nine Mile Power Plant hires supplemental workers for refueling, impacts local businesses

Scriba, N.Y. — Nine Mile Nuclear Power Plant is offline for refueling. It is part of two-year cycle in which nearly one third of the fuel in the reactor is replaced. Nine Mile’s Senior Communications Specialist Jill Lyon says it means a lot of outside workers are brought in to help.

“For this particular refueling outage we brought in 1,200 supplemental workers to support our in house technicians in performing more than seven four hundred activities,” Lyon said.

These workers come from all different backgrounds — many making their way to Oswego County from other parts of the country.

“We’ve got a combination of people who do this throughout the industry,” Lyon said. “So they’re traveling here all sorts of parts of the country. But we also get the county and surrounding counties that are in the trades that come here to work the outage from our local trades.”

With all those travelers. The community is going to have plenty of visitors, which impacts local businesses. A particular business that is seeing impact is the Holiday Inn Express on Route 104.

“I’d say about 80 percent of our business was from business that correlated with the plants in the area,” assistant manager and director of sales at the Holiday Express, Rebecca Forman said.

She says this influx of travelers gives the hotel a chance to develop regular customers and hopefully bring more visitors to the area in the future .

“If we give them a great experience from the beginning. They come back with their families,” Forman said. “We have harborfest during the summer, the speedway across the street, some of them like to come back and have some fun.”

Lyon says there is no set date for when the refueling will come to an end, but they will let the community know when that time comes.