By Wayne Barber
Now that Entergy has completed its final refueling for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., the company and other stakeholders are increasingly looking toward plant retirement in 2019 and the decommissioning process.
Entergy completed its final refueling in May. On June 15, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held an agency action review meeting that included executives from the company and discussion of the troubled power plant.
Much of the Pilgrim discussion focused upon overcoming the “degraded performance” in operation of the 680-megawatt boiling water reactor. The plant has faced a number of operational challenges and unscheduled shutdowns in recent years, which led to its placement on Column 4 of the NRC’s Action Matrix, the lowest possible safety rating for an operational nuclear facility. That resulted in increased enforcement by the regulator, including a special inspection that concluded earlier this year.
NRC staff, following more than 12,000 hours of inspections at Pilgrim in 2016, believes the plant “continues to operate with adequate safety margins,” but nonetheless will not receive a better safety rating until it can show a sustained improvement in performance, NRC Region 1 Administrator Daniel Dorman told the commissioners last week.
Entergy has submitted its draft revised recovery plan to the NRC for review, and the regulator expects to issue a confirmatory action letter in the coming weeks to document company commitments and establish the measures and schedule for returning the plant to baseline regulatory oversight. In the meantime, enhanced oversight, which has been in place since late 2013, continues.
“As they go into decommissioning with a full spent fuel pool and dry storage and the plans to move fuel from pool to dry storage, some of those issues [in the NRC’s confirmatory action letter] will still need to be shored up,” said Dorman, according to the transcript of the June 15 meeting.
Dorman was one of the NRC staff officials who briefed NRC Chair Kristine Svinicki and fellow Commissioners Jeff Baran and Stephen Burns during the session.
Company executives emphasized their intention to take Pilgrim out of Column 4 before the plant closes down in about two years.
“We’re committed to continuing to safely operate Pilgrim through June of 2019, after which decommissioning activities will commence,” Entergy Executive Vice President of Nuclear Operations and Chief Nuclear Officer Chris Bakken said during the NRC meeting.
As of April 2017, Entergy had approximately $1 billion in the Pilgrim decommissioning fund, said company spokesman Patrick O’Brien. The company does not yet have a cost estimate for the work, which would be included in its post-shutdown decommissioning activities report, he added. The PSDAR must be submitted to the NRC no later than two years after operations end.
About 620 people are currently employed at the plant. It’s difficult to say how many will remain during the first year after the facility is retired, but at Entergy’s Vermont Yankee plant about half of the staff remained after 18 months following its 2014 closure, O’Brien said.
Massachusetts has also established a Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel for Pilgrim. That body held its second monthly meeting on June 21.
Entergy has not yet committed to a decommissioning option at Pilgrim. The watchdog group Pilgrim Watch has asked that the citizens panel study the DECON and SAFSTOR options carefully. DECON would involve immediate disassembly of the facility, while the plant in SAFSTOR could be maintained and monitored for up to five decades before decontamination begins.
SAFSTOR, often considered “deferred dismantling,” a nuclear facility is maintained and monitored in a condition that allows the radioactivity to decay; afterwards, the plant is dismantled and the property decontaminated.
Entergy is also continuing to move Pilgrim’s spent fuel into dry storage. The first Pilgrim dry casks were loaded in 2014. There are now eight casks filled with 64 fuel assemblies, while the plant’s spent fuel pool holds about 3,000 assemblies.
