The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office on Monday asked a federal appeals court to order a stay on the already-completed transfer of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses for the retired Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station.
That action, plus two related measures by the federal regulator, should be frozen while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit considers the commonwealth’s September lawsuit on the matter, according to the petition. That lawsuit asks the court to vacate the NRC’s approval of the license transfers and other steps that allowed power company Entergy to sell its 47-year-old, one-reactor plant on Cape Cod to Holtec International.
Entergy closed Pilgrim in May. The NRC signed off on transfer of the site’s operations and spent-fuel storage licenses on Aug. 22, and the companies completed the deal a few days later. Holtec, an energy technology company based in New Jersey, then assumed all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management on the property.
The commonwealth of Massachusetts and local advocacy group Pilgrim Watch in February both filed for adjudicatory hearings in the license transfer. They argued that Holtec and Entergy had not fully demonstrated there were sufficient financial resources to complete decommissioning and that the NRC had not conducted a legally required environmental assessment or supplemental environmental impact statement of the license transfer.
The NRC said in October it was still considering the hearing requests even after approving the license transfers. It has not discussed any schedule for a decision.
In their petition Monday, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and other attorneys for the commonwealth said the NRC stated more than four decades ago that public participation in adjudicatory proceedings is key to “the sound discharge” of its responsibilities.
“Casting this ‘vital ingredient’ aside, the NRC unlawfully rendered a final determination that it could,” without accepting input from Massachusetts, “approve the transfer of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station’s (Pilgrim) license to new owners that lack the technical and financial qualifications to hold it, (ii) strip from the license a $50 million financial assurance condition that protected the Commonwealth and its citizens against safety and environmental hazards, and (iii) exempt the new licensee from a NRC regulation that would otherwise have categorically prohibited the licensee from using a Massachusetts electric-ratepayer-funded trust in the requested manner,” the petition says.
The agency did further damage, according to the commonwealth, by failing to evaluate the environmental impacts of those three actions before approving the license transfers. The NRC has also not ruled on Massachusetts’ Sept. 3 request for a stay of that action, the petition adds.
“Because those actions are causing irreparable harm to the Commonwealth and its citizens, and the balance of the equities strongly favors preserving the status quo pending appellate review, this Court should grant this motion staying the effectiveness of the NRC’s actions,” the attorneys wrote.
The NRC said Tuesday it does not comment on active litigation.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that Holtec met the required regulatory, legal, technical and financial requirements to qualify as licensee,” Holtec said in a statement Tuesday. “While we respect the petitioner’s rights to file legal motions, we are not going to comment on any specific legal motions or action.”
Decommissioning at Pilgrim is scheduled to be largely completed by 2027, with the plant’s spent-fuel storage pad remaining in place pending availability of an off-site storage or disposal facility. Holtec and Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin, under their Comprehensive Decommissioning International joint venture, have begun preliminary cleanup operations.
This is one of several retired or soon-to-be-retired nuclear power plants that Holtec plans to buy. The company on July 1 finished its acquisition of Exelon’s Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey. It also plans in coming years to acquire at least two more sites from Entergy: the Indian Point Energy Center in New York state and the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan. Both of those facilities are schedule to close by 2022.
In each case, the plant’s decommissioning trust would pass to Holtec. That fund would be a central source of profit for the transaction, with some amount left over when decommissioning is complete. Holtec says that about $200 million of the roughly $1 billion that was in the Pilgrim trust at the time of the sale will remain when its decommissioning and site restoration work is done.
