The company in charge of decommissioning a New Jersey nuclear power plant will lay off just under a hundred of its employees later this summer, according to the state’s labor department.
Holtec International subsidiary company Consolidated Decommissioning International (CDI) will lay off 92 workers at Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Forked River, N.J. effective August 1. The company, which is decommissioning Oyster Creek, notified the New Jersey labor department of the mass layoff in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) this month, according to the state agency’s website.
A spokesperson for Holtec told RadWaste Monitor in an email Tuesday that the layoff had been planned since Oyster Creek shut down in 2018. Employees were made aware of the staff reduction at the time, the spokesperson said. The layoffs were “part of [Holtec’s] safe and efficient decommissioning strategy for Oyster Creek as our project evolves from nuclear-focused activities to a more industrial dismantlement and demolition project,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Holtec is moving forward with decommissioning the plant. The company announced in May that it had finished moving all of Oyster Creek’s spent fuel — 33 canisters in all — to onsite dry storage.
The Camden, N.J.-based nuclear services company is also working on other decommissioning projects, including at New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which officially changed hands to Holtec from Entergy May 28. A spokesperson for Holtec said that CDI “inherited approximately 300 existing Entergy employees” in the change of ownership.
