A panel made up of local stakeholders met for the first time this week to discuss the decommissioning of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, even as a nuclear watchdog group decried the body as “corporate.”
The Community Advisory Panel (CAP) — organized by TMI-2 Solutions, the EnergySolutions subsidiary responsible for dismantling Three Mile Island — met virtually on Wednesday. They’ll meet again on August 4, according to panel chairman Steve Letavic.
The CAP, established after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved in December the Dauphin County, Pa. plant’s license transfer to EnergySolutions from Exelon, is designed to “engage the local community and to facilitate communications” about decommissioning, the charter said. TMI-2 Solutions will provide quarterly progress reports to the panel for discussion.
Eric Epstein, chair of nuclear watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert, argued that the panel lacks teeth. In a press release provided to RadWaste Monitor via email Tuesday, Epstein said that the advisory group “is a corporate extension of TMI-2 Solutions, which funds, manages, and staffs the panel.”
“TMIA advocated for a truly independent advisory panel modeled on the community-based Advisory Panel created after the TMI-2 accident,” Epstein said. After the plant’s partial meltdown in 1979, an independent community panel was formed to consult with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on site cleanup. The group met 78 times over thirteen years.
Three Mile Island Alert was invited to serve on the current panel but refused, the statement said. Since they’re litigating against TMI-2 Solutions over the plant’s sale, they didn’t want to “lend credibility to an illegitimate license transfer” by participating, Epstein told RadWaste Monitor in an email Thursday. The watchdog group filed a formal request with NRC to halt the sale March 15.
The panel’s first meeting comes as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission are also reviewing allegations from Three Mile Island Alert that the plant’s sale violates a rule in the 1972 Clean Water Act that would require EnergySolutions and Exelon to get state permission to ignore water quality standards for decommissioning.
By deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor, neither organization has said whether there were any water-related violations connected with the decommissioning process.
EnergySolutions first announced their intention to purchase Three Mile Island in 2019. The plant’s Unit 2 reactor shut down in 1979 after a partial core meltdown.
