By John Stang
Holtec International announced this week it would buy three nuclear power plants set to close in coming months and years, then turn them over for decommissioning by a joint venture recently formed with a Canadian engineering corporation.
On Tuesday, Chicago-based power company Exelon said it would sell its Oyster Creek Generating Station in Lacey Township, N.J., to Holtec. The single-reactor facility is due to end operations on Sept. 17, and the sale would be completed in the third quarter of 2019.
Holtec followed that by announcing Wednesday plans to buy two nuclear plants from another utility company, Entergy: the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, Mass., and the Palisades Power Plant in Covert, Mich. Holtec would also take over the New Orleans company’s already-decommissioned Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant near Charlevoix, Mich., where the only activity is maintaining a dry fuel storage facility.
“Transferring our Pilgrim and Palisades plants to Holtec, with its vast experience and innovative use of technology, will lead to their decommissioning faster than if they were to remain under Entergy’s ownership,” said Entergy Chairman and CEO said Leo Denault in a news release. “Earlier decommissioning benefits the surrounding communities.”
In all three cases, the plant’s licenses and decommissioning trust funds would transfer to Holtec. The Camden. N.J., energy technology company would be responsible for decommissioning each facility, site restoration, and management of spent reactor fuel.
Holtec plans to contract the decommissioning and spent fuel work of all three sites to Comprehensive Decommissioning International, its new joint venture with Montreal-based engineering and construction company SNC-Lavalin.
Right now, Holtec expects to complete decommissioning at Oyster Creek and Pilgrim within eight years. Holtec is expected to assume control of the Palisades site after it shuts down in 2022, with a decommissioning timetable to be determined closer to the shutdown date.
The financial terms of the three purchases and the proposed CDI contracts are confidential, a Holtec spokeswoman said.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must approve all of the license transfers, which in each case could take up to three years.
“When a plant is sold, we review the buyer’s technical and financial capacities to run and maintain, and ultimately decommission, the plant. These license transfer requests are likely to have some unique qualities to them, as opposed to a simple transfer from one operating company to another. So we will review the requests when we get them and determine a path forward and a schedule at that time,” an NRC spokesman said by email.
Holtec’s approach is a relatively new, but not original, business model. Salt Lake City-based nuclear services provider EnergySolutions assumed the NRC licenses of retired nuclear plants in Illinois and Wisconsin for decommissioning, but will pass control back to the owners when its work is complete. New York City-based decommissioning specialist NorthStar Group Services plans to buy Entergy’s retired Vermont Yankee plant, with state and regulatory rulings on the deal expected in coming months.
In the Vermont Yankee deal, NorthStar is paying a nominal $1,000 to take the facility off Entergy’s hands. It would keep some portion of the plant’s decommissioning trust when cleanup is complete, which management hopes to reach as early as 2026 at a cost of about $811 million.
Joy Russell, Holtec’s vice president for corporate business development, declined to say Thursday whether the company would pursue a revenue-producing approach similar to NorthStar’s in its reactor decommissioning programs.
“Holtec and SNC-Lavalin’s experience with decommissioning projects has led to a well-thought out process for dismantling the plants in a safe and cost-effective manner, creating assurance that the facility can be removed from the site using existing decommissioning trust funds,” she said by mail. “With this accelerated method, CDI systematically deconstructs nuclear plants with utmost environmental protection and supreme worker safety in the shortest possible time.”
NorthStar in 2017 joined with nuclear fuel cycle company Orano to form Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, which also aims to buy closed nuclear plants for cleanup. Executives had acknowledged that ADP intended to buy the Pilgrim and Palisades plants. Orano on Friday declined comment on the matter.
Oyster Creek is the oldest operating commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, beginning operations in 1969. Upon closure, Exelon previously had planned to place the facility into SAFSTOR mode, in which active decommissioning must be completed within 60 years. That delay would be intended to allow time for radiation levels to drop and cleanup funding trusts to build up. Exelon had believed decommissioning would cost $1.5 billion.
Pilgrim is due to close on May 31, 2019, after 46 years of service. Holtec and Entergy expect to file a license transfer request late this year for the one-reactor facility, hoping to complete the sale by late 2019. Decommissioning would begin the following year.
For the 47-year-old, one-reactor Palisades facility, the license transfer request would take place closer to its planned shutdown in spring 2022. Holtec and Entergy aim to seal the deal by the end of that year.
Based on March 2017 filings with the NRC, Oyster Creek had $888.5 million in its decommissioning trust as of Dec. 31, 2016. Pilgrim had $960.3 million and Palisades had $425.7 million as of the same date.
The NRC expects minimum decommissioning needs are $1.083 billion for Oyster Creek, $603.8 million for Pilgrim, and $457.2 million for Palisades.
This week’s announcements represent Holtec’s latest moves in the commercial nuclear sphere. The company is also seeking an NRC license to build a consolidated interim storage facility in New Mexico for spent fuel from nuclear plants around the country.
The NRC ruling is expected by 2020 and Holtec hopes to begin operations by 2022. The initial 40-year license would cover underground storage of 8,680 metric tons of radioactive waste, but that could eventually expand to over 100,000 metric tons.
The spent fuel would likely remain there until the Department of Energy builds a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., or another location.
