An AREVA-NorthStar Group Services joint venture no longer expects to seal the deal in 2017 on its first acquisitions of nuclear plants for decommissioning, an executive said Monday.
The two companies in February announced the formation of Accelerated Decommissioning Partnership, which would buy closed nuclear plants and then carry out decommissioning, site restoration, and used fuel management. Executives acknowledged the new company was in talks to buy Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts and Palisades Power Plant in Michigan.
“It won’t be this year,” Geoff Wilde, site acquisitions director for both ADP and AREVA D&D, said in an interview. He said he could not say when the sales might be finalized.
“It had to do with a lot of the timing of working with the utility, but also I think the utility, Entergy, was having another look at Palisades in light of the timing there,” Wilde told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Entergy had planned to shut down the single-reactor Palisades facility in October 2018, but last week pushed that back to spring 2022 following the mutual termination of a deal for Michigan utility Consumers Energy to buy the agreement under which it currently purchases power from the plant.
Pilgrim remains on schedule to shut down on May 31, 2019.
Wilde indicated ADP is taking the change in stride, saying four years is not long within the lifetime of a nuclear plant and a decommissioning timeline that can stretch for decades. He noted that the agreement with Entergy had also originally included the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York, which also got a new lease of life via a zero-emissions credit program from New York state and a sale this year from Entergy to Exelon.
