Concerns over Holtec’s ability to finance the decommissioning of the Palisades nuclear plant, currently owned by Entergy Corp., rang loud at a public meeting held Tuesday afternoon to discuss the two companies’ request to swap ownership of the plant.
Holtec plans to submit the application in December. The plant is scheduled to operate into 2022.
The bulk of the critique came from Kevin Kamps, who works as the “radioactive waste watchdog” at Beyond Nuclear, a Maryland-based anti-nuclear nonprofit.
“My major concern about Holtec’s takeover of the Palisades site [is] that it will do a shallow cleanup leaving a lot of radioactive contamination behind to so-called ‘naturally attenuate’ into the environment, into Lake Michigan, into aquifers,” said Kamps. “And that it will also take shortcuts on high level radioactive waste management. That’s my concern, because Holtec is driven by a profit drive. And so they’re going to try to save as much money and then simply comment as pure profit.”
There’s currently $552 million in the Palisades decommissioning trust fund, Holtec’s chief operating officer Pam Cowan said. That’s slightly more than half the amount in the Pilgrim plant decommissioning trust fund, which holds around $1 billion.
When asked about the disparity between the two funds, NRC financial analyst Shawn Harrwell said he can’t speculate on the financial qualifications of applicants who haven’t submitted applications yet.
Cowan said Holtec won’t start decommissioning the facility without enough money to do so. Current plans allow for a three-year period after Holtec takes ownership of the firm, should the license be granted, to allow the decommissioning trust fund to grow at a rate of 2% per year.
“We’re a responsible company, and we’re not going to start the decommissioning and spending the funds until we’re sure we can complete the decommissioning,” Cowan said.
Some also expressed concern over where the waste will go once the site is decommissioned. The answer to that question depends on whether the NRC approves applications for consolidated interim waste storage units in New Mexico and Texas, which it’s slated to do next year.
Palisades is scheduled to shut down on May 31, 2022; a couple years later than the original shutdown date of 2018. The companies agreed to the sale in August 2018, a year after Entergy announced plans to close the plant, according to slides released by Holtec and Entergy before the meeting.
Holtec and Entergy plan to submit the license transfer application together sometime in December and will request that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approve the application by December 2021. Entergy plans to select some 260 “Decommissioning Organization” employees from among the plant’s current staff of around 600 to stay, should the sale close.
If the NRC approves the license transfer, Holtec will acquire the Palisades Nuclear Decommissioning Trust — which held a balance of approximately $552 million total as of December 2 — as well as the plant’s decommissioning obligation and the title to its spent nuclear fuel and Department of Energy Standard Contract.
Holtec plans to complete decommissioning of the plant by 2041, 40 years earlier than it would take Entergy to facilitate the process alone through the SafeStor method, according to a joint presentation the companies published ahead of the meeting. Selling the plant to Holtec cuts the decommissioning period in half, according to the presentation.
Holtec will serve as the main contractor on the project, while Comprehensive Decommissioning International, LLC (CDI) will facilitate the actual decommissioning as a subcontractor. CDI is a joint venture between Holtec and SNC-Lavalin.
The most recent Palisades refueling was completed in October 2020, the companies said in their slides.
The slides said the sale isn’t certain yet, and depends on a number of factors, namely the approval of the license transfer and the “docketing of certifications of permanent cessation of operations and permanent removal of fuel from the reactor.”
Holtec plans to spend three years removing fuel from the plant, from 2022 after the site shuts down to 2025. The company said it will start defueling 30 days after the plant closes.
At other Holtec decommissioning sites, such as the Indian Point Energy Center in New York, community groups have expressed concern that Holtec doesn’t have the money to execute its decommissioning plans on schedule.
Holtec has already started decommissioning another nuclear plant previously owned by Entergy — the Massachusetts-based Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, which ceased operation in May 2019. Holtec’s license transfer application to decommission the plant was approved less than three months after the shutdown. The company plans to complete most decommissioning and site restoration processes by 2027.
