The owner and prospective buyer of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts said this week that the state and a local advocacy group should not be allowed to intervene in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission license transfer review needed for the sale to proceed.
In separate filings Monday with the NRC, power company Entergy and energy technology specialist Holtec International said the commonwealth of Massachusetts had failed to file any admissible contentions against the license transfer and that the nongovernmental Pilgrim Watch had failed to both submit reasonable contentions or show that it has standing to intervene.
The companies filed their license transfer application in November and hope for an NRC ruling by May 31, the date the single-reactor nuclear power plant is scheduled to close. Entergy hopes by the end of the year to sell the facility to Holtec, which then would own Pilgrim’s decommissioning trust fund and all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and Pilgrim Watch in February filed separate intervention and hearing petitions.If approved, they would become parties to the regulatory review.
On the question of standing, the Attorney General’s Office simply said it represents the state in which the plant is located, while Pilgrim Watch said a number of its members live within 10 miles of the Cape Cod facility.
Their contentions were largely identical: Entergy and Holtec have not shown there is enough money to pay for decommissioning in the event of unexpected developments, as demanded by law, and the companies have not performed the necessary environmental evaluations for the license transfer.
While they did not contest the state’s standing to intervene, Entergy and Holtec said in a joint filing its contentions do not meet the legal threshold for admission.
“The Commonwealth’s first contention primarily challenges the financial qualifications of [Holtec subsidiaries Holtec Decommissioning International] and Holtec Pilgrim to decommission Pilgrim but fails to demonstrate any genuine material dispute with the financial analysis and other pertinent information in the application demonstrating their financial qualifications,” according to the response from Holtec and Entergy.
They added that NRC regulations specifically do not require environmental reviews of license transfers.
The same arguments are raised in the Holtec-Entergy objection to Pilgrim Watch’s petition for intervention. It adds that the petition should be entirely dismissed, as the group has not proven standing to intercede: “In short, Pilgrim Watch does not allege any concrete and particularized injury involving radiological or environmental harm that plausibly flows from the proposed action.”
Holtec, via a joint venture with Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, says it can largely complete decommissioning by 2026 — decades ahead of Entergy’s previous plan. That would leave only dry storage of spent reactor fuel, which by law the Department of Energy must remove for disposal. In the responses to both intervention petitions, the companies say the decommissioning trust would have more than $1 billion at the time of license transfer, and that over $200 million would remain when spent fuel management is the only work that remains.
“Their reply was not unexpected,” Mary Lampert, Pilgrim Watch director, said by email Thursday. “Entergy wants the ‘money off its back’ ASAP and Holtec wants in. There is considerable monies to be made in decommissioning.”
The intervention petitioners have until April 1 to respond to the Entergy/Holtec filings. The state Attorney General’s Office on Thursday declined to comment.
The five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have not set a schedule for ruling on the petitions, an agency spokeperson said.
Lampert said she remained skeptical of the companies’ explanations of their financial surety for decommissioning, including that they would reap funds from the federal government for the Energy Department’s failure to meet its legal mandate to remove spent fuel from Pilgrim and all other nuclear power plants.
“We fully expect that we and the Commonwealth will get a hearing, and, at trial, will prove exactly what our petitions say – there will be shortfalls that the [decommissioning trust fund] cannot cover and Holtec Pilgrim and HDI are not financially responsible- leaving the job undone or the Commonwealth holding the bag,” she wrote.
Holtec, based in Camden, N.J., is also planning separate acquisitions for Exelon’s newly closed Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey and the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, which Entergy plans to retire in 2022.
Separately, the NRC has scheduled a public hearing for March 26 in Plymouth, Mass., to discuss Pilgrim’s safety performance in 2018.
The plant from 2015 to early this year was in Column 4 of the agency’s Action Matrix, the lowest ranking allowed for a nuclear power facility to continue operating, following unplanned shutdowns and other operational problems. Under intense NRC scrutiny, Entergy starting in August 2017 carried out 156 corrective actions. Early this month, the NRC raised it to Column 1 of the Action Matrix – standard oversight.
“The inspections that led the agency to conclude areas in need of attention were addressed, which led to sustained safety performance improvement at the plant,” the NRC said in a press release Tuesday. “In addition, at the end of the year, all inspection findings and performance indicators were of very low safety significance. As a result, Pilgrim is under the NRC’s normal level of oversight, which entails thousands of hours of inspection each year.”
The public meeting is one of a series the NRC is scheduling to discuss safety performance last year at nuclear plants around the country. It is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. at the Regency Ballroom of the Hotel 1620 Plymouth Harbor, 180 Water St. in Plymouth.
