Thomas Gardiner
The owner of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station (PNPS) in Massachusetts and nuclear watchdogs are questioning the effectiveness of state legislation that would force the company to pay the state $25 million annually for each year decommissioning of the facility remains unfinished after a half-decade.
The bill was filed in January in the Massachusetts General Court by state Rep. Mathew Muratore (R), but was only heard earlier this month by the bicameral Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy Committee. It has more than 30 co-sponsors.
Tom Joyce, a lobbyist for plant owner Entergy, told the committee that it would be impossible to complete decommissioning within a five-year window of the Cape Cod facility’s closure, The Patriot Ledger reported. He said the fuel now being used in the reactor will remain in Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool for five years after the plant’s scheduled shutdown on May 31, 2019. The five-year wait allows the spent fuel assemblies to cool sufficiently for transfer to dry storage.
The bill would establish a state Nuclear Power Station Post-closure Trust Fund where the fees would be deposited. That trust would be available for the state treasury to make payments for post-closure activities at the facility, but only if the federal decommissioning trust required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been exhausted. Muratore’s legislation would also prevent any money in that fund from being moved to the state’s General Fund, and any remaining balance would be returned to the plant’s owner after the state has confirmed that post-closure operations have finished.
The bill applies to all nuclear power plants in the state of Massachusetts, but Pilgrim is the only such facility operating in the state. The Yankee Rowe nuclear plant, near the border with Vermont, closed in 1992 and officially completed decommissioning in 2007.
Mary Lampert, director of the nongovernmental Pilgrim Watch, said she also thinks the five-year mark is senseless.
“Hopefully when the bill comes out of committee they will pull the five-year trigger mark out,” she said in a telephone interview. “No one can do that in five years; it would take more than five years just to empty the spent fuel pool.”
Pilgrim’s decommissioning trust fund currently has a roughly $1 billion balance. An Entergy spokesperson said decommissioning cost estimates are not yet available. Those figures would be included in the post-shutdown activities report for Pilgrim, which does not have to be delivered to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission until two years after operations end.
Lampert said she wants the bill to focus on protecting ratepayers and not full of schedule stipulations that will make it less likely to pass. “The main issue is to protect the commonwealth from being stuck with the bill once Entergy has spent the trust fund, packs their bags, and heads back to Louisiana.”
No action was taken on the bill and the joint committee remains in deliberation.
Entergy has been in talks to sell Pilgrim upon closure to Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, a joint venture of AREVA Nuclear Materials and NorthStar Group Services, which would manage all decommissioning and site restoration work. An AREVA executive in October acknowledged that any deal, which could also include Entergy’s Palisades plant in Michigan, would not be completed in 2017.
Such a deal could take Pilgrim from a potential 60-year decommissioning process down to about a dozen years. It is not yet known if Pilgrim will use the SAFSTOR decommissioning method, in which site restoration can be delayed for decades. According to Entergy’s website, that will not be decided until the decommissioning plan is officially in place.
According to a 2015 study by the Callan Institute, nuclear power plant decommissioning typically advances by about 6-9 percent per year. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that number at less than 5 percent. Even at 9 percent, the plant would not be halfway through decommissioning at the five-year mark, leaving Entergy on the hook for millions of dollars each year, all coming from the decommissioning trust fund.
Joyce said the potential penalty is purely punitive, but told the committee the plant would still cease operations as scheduled. He said there “sadly” is no reasonable chance of Pilgrim remaining operational beyond the end of May 2019.
