Exelon said May 30 that “absent needed policy reforms” it will retire its 837 MW Three Mile Island Generating Station (TMI) near Harrisburg, Penn., by September 30, 2019.
Chris Crane, president and chief executive of Exelon, held out the caveat that the reactor could operate beyond that point if Pennsylvania follows the lead of New York and Illinois and implements a nuclear-friendly zero-emissions credit program that rewards carbon-free baseload generation.
But for now, Exelon is informing key stakeholders, which will include sending the PJM Interconnection a deactivation notice and making permanent shutdown notifications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within 30 days of Tuesday.
Three Mile Island, which currently has only a spent fuel pool, is in the process of building an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation. At the end of 2016, Three Mile had approximately 753 metric tons of fuel or 1,594 fuel assemblies on site. The company is still assessing its options for decommissioning the plan, a spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor this week.
Exelon is planning to pour a concrete pad for dry cask storage at TMI-1 in either late 2018 or early 2019, an NRC spokesperson said.
Exelon is also taking steps to end capital investment projects required for long-term operation of TMI; and canceling 2019 fuel purchases and outage planning, affecting about 1,500 outage workers.
TMI, a pressurized water reactor, directly employs 675 workers and contracts another 1,500 local union workers for refueling outages.
In 2009, Three Mile Island Unit 1 received a 20-year extension to the plant’s operating license from NRC. The license is not currently scheduled to expire until April 2034.
Three Mile Island Unit 2 is owned by FirstEnergy which was damaged during an infamous meltdown accident in 1979 and never reopened.
After the partial meltdown at TMI-2 in March 1979, TMI-1 was kept offline until 1985, during which time it had to make plant modifications and implement other changes. As a result, the spent fuel pool at TMI-1 has had more storage capacity for longer than most other U.S. nuclear power plants.
When it comes to retirement, the company would then have to notify the federal agency once it had actually shut down the reactor and once it had removed the fuel from the reactor for the last time.
A Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR) for the plant would have to be submitted to us within two years after the permanent cessation of operations, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.
The owners of most other plants planning to permanently shut down usually try to get a jump on the process by submitting decommissioning-related exemption requests, NRC said.
TMI-1 had approximately $888.5 million in its fund as of the end of last year, according to a report that Exelon Generation filed with NRC on March 30. Nuclear plant owners must submit updates on their funds every two years or every year if the plant is within five years of permanent shutdown.
