Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI) has secured the contract for decommissioning the retired Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts, one of the company’s owners said Monday.
The deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin stated in a press release. It was signed on Jan. 31, CDI spokesman Pat O’Brien said by email. The specific value is business-sensitive information that is not being released, he added.
The announcement was expected. New Jersey energy technology firm Holtec International bought the single-reactor Pilgrim property on Cape Cod in August and is the other owner of Comprehensive Decommissioning International. Holtec formed CDI with SNC-Lavalin with the express purpose of decommissioning Pilgrim and other retired nuclear power plants it has acquired or plans to buy.
Comprehensive Decommissioning International “is pleased to welcome 270 former Pilgrim station employees to the project,” President Kelly Trice said in the release. “Their knowledge of the local community and the single-reactor Pilgrim plant, coupled with CDI’s approach to beginning the decommissioning process now will ensure we restore the site for re-use in the safest and shortest possible time.”
The announcement came just days after the Pilgrim plant filed a notice under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act last week with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development that it plans to lay off 57 people by April 3. That would drop the plant’s workforce to roughly 180 — down from 580 in early 2019 when the plant was online.
This is CDI’s second decommissioning contract, behind the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey. Holtec bought that shuttered facility last July. It also intends in coming years to acquire the Indian Point Energy Center in New York state and the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. Each deal also brings the plant’s nuclear decommissioning trust funds to Holtec, a source of potential profit upon completion of decommissioning.
Then-owner Entergy permanently power down Pilgrim’s boiling water reactor on May 31, 2019. In August, staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized the transfer of the site’s reactor and spent-fuel storage licenses from Entergy to Holtec. The companies completed the sale just a few days later.
Decommissioning is expected to be largely complete by 2027, starting with construction of an additional storage pad for Pilgrim’s spent nuclear fuel.
The commonwealth of Massachusetts is still waiting for an NRC ruling on its petition for intervenor status and a hearing in the transfer of Pilgrim’s reactor and spent-fuel storage licenses. In the interim, it has asked a federal court to roll back the license transfer and other NRC actions that allowed the sale to proceed. The commission itself has the power to reverse the staff decision on the license transfer.
The commonwealth has formally requested the U.S Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to provide an opinion on Massachusetts’ arguments prior to the NRC ruling on the state’s petition for intervenor status.
On Jan. 29, the NRC filed its latest arguments in the case, contending the commonwealth should wait for the federal agency’s decisions before taking the matter to federal court. The agency also argued that the National Environmental Policy Act does not require any judicial review of this matter prior to the commission ruling on Massachusetts’ petition. On Wednesday, Entergy and Holtec — as intervenors in the lawsuit — filed similar arguments to the appeals court.
