By John Stang
Entergy Corp. on Monday completed the sale of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts to Holtec International for an undisclosed amount of money.
The move came quickly on the heels of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval on Aug. 22 of the transfer of Pilgrim’s federal operational and spent fuel storage licenses, even as the commonwealth of Massachusetts attempted to intercede in the proceeding.
“The successful Pilgrim transaction demonstrates continued progress on Entergy’s exit from merchant power markets,” said Entergy Chairman and CEO Leo Denault in a press release. “With our previously-announced signed agreements for the post-shutdown sales of Indian Point and Palisades nuclear power plants in 2021 and 2022, respectively, we remain on track to accomplish our exit plan.”
Holtec, an energy technology firm based in Camden, N.J., is now responsible for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management at the one-reactor facility that shut down on May 31. The company says it can complete decommissioning in eight years within the funding provided by the decommissioning trust for Pilgrim, which passed from Entergy as part of the sale. Holtec predicts a $1.134 billion decommissioning budget, with slightly more than $1 billion currently in its trust.
Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that Holtec and its Holtec Decommissioning International affiliate “met the regulatory, legal, technical and financial requirements necessary to qualify as licensees,” the agency said last week.
Holtec Decommissioning International will become the licensed operator at Pilgrim. Comprehensive Decommissioning International — a joint venture of Holtec and scandal-plagued Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin — is to conduct the actual decommissioning.
“We are committed to engaging with stakeholders at the local and state levels to ensure a smooth flow of information throughout the decommissioning process,” Holtec President and CEO Kris Singh said in the same release. “The cutting-edge technologies we use will ensure maximum safety for our employees and communities and enable the site to be decommissioned decades sooner than if Pilgrim had remained under Entergy’s ownership.”
Alongside approval for the license transfer, the NRC permitted Holtec to use funds from Pilgrim’s decommissioning trust for used fuel movement and storage purposes, according to a notice in the Federal Register. The regulator had issued a corresponding exemption to Entergy in July.
Boston Edison brought the 690-watt boiling water reactor online in 1972. It sold the facility to Entergy for $80 million in 1999. In 2015, the New Orleans-based power company announced it would retire Massachusetts’ last nuclear power plant by June 1 of this year, saying increasing operating costs and competition with natural gas as a power source had made the facility economically unviable. The sale to Holtec was announced in August 2018.
The NRC received the companies’ license transfer application three months later. In February, the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the local citizens’ group Pilgrim Watch filed paperwork requesting a hearing and intervention in the NRC proceeding. Among their concerns were Holtec’s financial viability to finish decommissioning. As of Friday, the NRC had not ruled on the two petitions.
As the license transfer proceeding neared its end, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office filed a flurry of paperwork in hopes of ensuring the commonwealth would have a say in the matter. The NRC on Aug. 21 allowed the commonwealth up to 10 days to file a request for a stay of the license transfer order, but Holtec and Entergy finished the sale before the deadline arrived.
“We are deeply disappointed in the NRC’s misguided decision to approve the license transfer and trust fund exemption requests, and its failure to meaningfully consult with our state prior to doing so,” said Chloe Gotsis, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. “We continue to have serious concerns about Holtec’s financial capacity, technical qualifications, and judgment to safely and properly clean up the site, and store and manage Pilgrim’s spent nuclear fuel. We are reviewing all of our available options to ensure the health, safety and interests of our residents and the environment are protected.”
The commonwealth’s concerns have been echoed by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), other lawmakers, and local activist organizations, who had called on the NRC to slow the license transfer.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is abdicating any responsibility for protecting public health and safety with its rushed and uninformed license transfer for the Pilgrim nuclear power plant,” Markey said in an Aug. 23 statement after the NRC announced its approval of the license transfer. “The opaque process that disregarded local resident and state input reflects the Commission’s choice to prioritize industry timelines over due diligence and transparency. Holtec’s math on how it will pay for decommissioning does not add up. Holtec’s unwillingness to even negotiate an agreement with local stakeholders—the ones who will be living next door to nuclear waste for years to come—is unacceptable.”
Pilgrim is one of several retired or soon-to-close nuclear power plants that Holtec is acquiring for decommissioning. On July 1, it bought the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey from power company Exelon. It also plans to acquire Entergy’s Palisades Power Plant in Michigan and Indian Point Energy Center in New York state, which are due to close by 2022.
Its business model is based on keeping some portion of each plant’s decommissioning trust as profit once the work is completed.
About 270 employees at Pilgrim are shifting from Entergy to Holtec for decommissioning. The workforce count is down from roughly 580 at the time of closure. Retirements and transfers accounted for some of the reduction, Entergy has said.
Holtec expects to complete the transfer of used fuel at Pilgrim to dry storage within three years. That covers 4,114 fuel assemblies, all of which are now either in the plant’s cooling pool or already in dry storage. In documents submitted to the NRC last year, Holtec said it expected to spend just over $500 million on spent fuel management at Pilgrim. The company is seeking an NRC license for a facility in New Mexico that would provide temporary storage of spent fuel from Pilgrim and other U.S. nuclear plants until a permanent repository is ready.
