The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Petition Review Board recently agreed to review a request to determine whether FirstEnergy Solutions should be found in breach of its federal requirement to ensure it can fund decommissioning of three nuclear power plants scheduled for closure in coming years.
The NRC sent a memo to that effect on Aug. 2 to the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center.
“Notably, they accepted ELPC’s petition in entirety—no parts of it were rejected. The next step is for the PRB to substantively review the petition and come up with recommendations for action, which it will send to the director (of the NRC). The director ultimately makes the final decision on what actions, if any, the NRC will take against the licensee,” the organization said on its Web site.
No information was available Tuesday on how long the review is likely to take.
Saying the facilities were no longer economically viable, FirstEnergy Solutions on March 28 announced it would between May 2020 and October 2021 shut down the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio, Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Ohio, and Beaver Valley Power Station in Pennsylvania. Three days later, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
At the same time, the Environmental Law & Policy Center sent a petition to the NRC asserting that FirstEnergy’s nuclear decommissioning trusts and parent company guarantees could not be counted on to cover the costs for cleaning up the four reactors at the three plants. It noted FirstEnergy’s financial troubles and said external trust funds as of March 2017 were $350 million short of the estimated $2.1 billion projected cost of decommissioning the three sites.
The situation puts the power company in breach of federal rules intended to ensure nuclear plant owners have the money to clean them up once they shut down, according to the petition.
