After an environmental group’s complaints, the company in charge of decommissioning a Michigan nuclear plant said in a Tuesday regulatory filing that it plans to switch the contractor for the job.
Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI), part-owned by SNC-Lavalin and responsible for dismantling Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, will no longer be the project’s general contractor, Holtec said in a notice to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Instead, Holtec will take over CDI’s resources and “directly employ site personnel to perform the scope of work previously planned to be executed by CDI,” the company said.
NRC in December approved the Covert, Mich., plant’s sale to Holtec from Entergy for decommissioning. Holtec has said that it could finalize the transaction by June or so.
The change also “moots” concerns raised by anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear in its February 2021 request for a hearing on Palisades’s sale, Holtec’s Tuesday notice said. Beyond Nuclear’s contentions called into question “the business character of SNCLavalin, the minority upstream corporate parent of CDI,” Holtec said.
Beyond Nuclear contended that the Montreal-based engineering services company has “been debarred, seen their officers and employees convicted of bribery for contracts in multiple countries, generated illegal campaign contributions, and other civil and criminal wrongdoing.”
In 2015, SNC-Lavalin was charged with fraud and a violation of Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act for allegedly bribing officials in Libya from 2001 to 2011 with the goal of securing business in the country.
SNC-Lavalin in 2013 also agreed not to take on construction projects funded by the World Bank for 10 years following a scandal involving misconduct related to a bridge construction project in Bangladesh. The international monetary body lifted those sanctions early in 2021 since the company was compliant with the agreement.
Updated Jan. 27, 2022 1:56 p.m. Eastern time to reflect that the Holtec-SNC Lavalin joint venture is called Comprehensive Decommissioning International.
