Entergy expects the license transfer application for its Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts to proceed through review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission more quickly than the recently wrapped process for the Vermont Yankee power plant, an executive said Wednesday.
In both cases, the New Orleans-based energy provider wants to sell the facility to another company, which will take ownership of its decommissioning trust fund and all responsibility for cleanup and spent fuel management on the property.
Entergy and NorthStar Group Services filed the license transfer application for the shuttered Vermont Yankee plant in February 2017. The agency approved the request earlier this month, but the companies are still waiting on the OK from a state regulator before sealing the deal.
The license transfer application for selling Pilgrim to Holtec International is due to be filed by the end of this year, Andrew Marsh, Entergy executive vice president and chief financial officer, said during a conference call on the company’s third-quarter earnings.
“[The] Vermont Yankee deal is kind of a first of a kind deal, so everybody was learning through that process, and certainly, the NRC was learning through the process, and we would expect that there would be some kind of learning curve associated with it,” Marsh said. “And so our current anticipation is that we would complete the Pilgrim process by the end of next year.”
Pilgrim is scheduled to close by June 1, 2019. Entergy also plans to sell its Palisades Power Plant in Michigan to Holtec. That facility is due to close in 2022. “But if we would expect some time second half of 2022 is whenever we would be able to close that particular half of the transaction,” Marsh said.
Entergy on Wednesday reported third-quarter 2018 earnings of $536 million ($2.92 per share) on an as-reported basis. Operational basis earnings came in at $693 million ($3.77 per share). Those numbers were up from the same quarter of 2017: $398 million ($2.21 per share) in as-reported earnings and $424 million ($2.35 per share) in operational-basis earnings.
