Holtec Decommissioning International will participate in but not pay for an independent study of discharging wastewater from the shuttered Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts into Cape Cod bay, the company told the state’s junior U.S. senator Friday.
“We believe your independent panel will confirm the scientific facts to inform the public,” the company wrote in a letter to Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.).
Markey, responding to some of his constituents who have bitterly opposed what Holtec says is a routine, regulatorily permissible practice of discharging some irradiated wastewater into the bay, wrote to Holtec earlier in March seeking the company’s continued cooperation with an independent inquiry into the planned discharge.
Holtec said it would cooperate but sought to allay any impression that company CEO Krishna Singh’s testimony before a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee in 2022 committed Holtec to funding the study.
“Dr Singh did not offer to pay for third party consultants, but rather provide data and access to your experts,” Holtec wrote in the letter, which media including Boston’s local National Public Radio affiliate, WBUR, posted online.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency meanwhile has said that Holtec’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Systems with the agency did not as written allow the sort of discharge the company planned into Cape Cod Bay.
Holtec, in its Friday letter to Markey, said it planned to submit a permit modification request to the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday.
