Courtesy of Millstone

Millstone Power Station runs off a water discharge permit that expired in 1997

Millstone built us a new bridge. Millstone replaced the leaky roof on our food pantry. Millstone built a playscape for disabled kids.

From some of the testimony last week, you'd hardly know that the Millstone nuclear power plant was up for a water discharge permit and not the Rotary Club's corporate citizenship award.

Elected leaders lined up to gush about what a great neighbor the nuke plant is. How they lease the East Lyme police station to the town for $1 a year. How they dropped $100,000 on a new roof for the United Way Food Center. How they bought a new vehicle for the town dog catcher.

After a while, it started to sound like a recitation of how an out-of-state energy giant bought and sold local officialdom.

Millstone isn't up for the good neighbor award. It's seeking to renew its water discharge permit, a license to suck 2.2 billion gallons of water a day from Niantic Bay to cool its reactors, then flush it back into Long Island Sound 10 to 20 degrees warmer.

The process kills billions of fish and fish eggs. They're swallowed and pulverized by pumps, devastating what was once a vital habitat for winter flounder and other species.

Environmental groups want the state to make Millstone install a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water and could reduce fish kills by 98 percent.

Town officials who testified at a hearing in Old Lyme last week paid lip service to the fish, but waxed lyrical about the good deeds of Millstone and its corporate owner, Dominion of Virginia. And about how forcing them to build more eco-friendly cooling towers could totally ruin their views from the beach.

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Millstone Power Station's been running off a water discharge permit that expired in 1997. Under the federal Clean Water Act, power plants must renew permits every five years. That ensures they stay current with evolving technologies and clean water regulations.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has allowed Millstone to run using an "emergency" permit for the past 11 years. That essentially gives them a "license to pollute," according to Roger Reynolds, senior attorney with Connecticut Fund for the Environment.

"An old permit is a license to use outdated, environmentally destructive technology," Reynolds says. "This is rich tidal water with billions of organisms being sucked up and killed each and every day. This needs to be addressed."

Millstone's two working reactors generate 2,100 megawatts of power, enough to power 500,000 million homes here and around New England. Two years ago, the DEP issued a tentative approval of Millstone's permit renewal which included a cost-benefit analysis that weighed how much a closed-loop cooling system would cost the nuclear plant against its ecological benefits. The environmentalists cried foul.

"That's very subjective," Reynolds says. "How do you value fish?"

A federal appeals court agreed, ruling that state environmental agencies can not factor in cost-benefit analyses when determining what is the "best technology available." That allowed two state environmental groups, Soundkeeper and Connecticut Fund for the Environment's Save the Sound program, to broker a deal with Millstone and the state in September that finally sets a deadline for all the studies to be done and the state environmental commissioner to make a ruling: Jan. 1, 2012. That might seem like a long ways off (how many billions of fish will have been ground to bits by then?), but Reynolds says it beats the alternative.

"Studies tend to drag on for 10 years," he says. "We thought we would win if we litigated, but that would take three years and probably we'd get a court order telling DEP to hurry up. So we did a settlement."

Perhaps more important than the time line is the upshot of the deal: Whatever technology the study identifies as the "best available" must be installed, regardless of cost to the nuke plant. Reynolds says he's extremely confident it will be a more eco-friendly closed-loop system and confident the state will hold Millstone to it. If they don't, Reynolds promises a court battle.

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Elected leaders of the towns around Millstone are squarely behind the plant's permit application, albeit for decidedly non-environmental reasons.

And why shouldn't they be? Aside from being the largest employer and taxpayer in the immediate area, Millstone acts like a shadow government, handing out money for all manner of public projects.

Millstone owns the building that houses the East Lyme police department and leases it to the town for the cut rate of $1 a year. Millstone paid for a new bridge on Brainaird Road in East Lyme, and apparently some of its employees even helped construct it. Millstone bought East Lyme and Waterford a specialized vehicle for the animal control officer. Millstone donated $100,000 on a roof at the food panty and donated cash to build a playground.

All these deeds, and more, were the centerpiece of testimony by a half dozen elected officials and business leaders who stood at the microphone and told the state's environmental watchdog agency, essentially, that corporate citizenship alone should permit Millstone to profit off outdated, environmentally insensitive equipment.

When they were done with that, some of them trashed the idea of 500-foot cooling tower, only one of several less-destructive options for cooling the reactors with less harm to the eco-system.

East Lyme First Selectman Paul Formica said Simpsons-style cooling towers would create "a visual catastrophe."

"The constant release of steam that they emit will frighten witnesses who may misconstrue that steam as radiation vapors," Formica says. "Imagine the phone calls!" Shoreline leaders love their nuclear power, it would seem, so long as its destructive power only harms fish and not their vistas.

It took a woman of the cloth, Rev. Cynthia Willauer of the United Church of Christ, to point out the error of that logic. "The fish don't care about the aesthetics of the cooling tower," Willauer said at the meeting. "It doesn't matter to the fish."