Holtec International may not dump wastewater from the decommissioning of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant into Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts said last week.
The final decision to deny Holtec a state permit modification for the wastewater discharges had been simmering for about a year. In July 2023, Massachusetts made a tentative determination that Holtec’s permit application, if granted, would violate a state law protecting the ocean from pollutants.
The Pilgrim plant, which shut down in 2019, routinely discharged irradiated water into the bay while it was operating, under an exception to Massachusetts’ Ocean Sanctuaries Act. However, the state said the exception applies only to plants generating electricity, not to plants being decommissioned.
Holtec, meanwhile, has maintained that it is allowed to make the discharges under federal law, and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, is the agency that can give or withhold permission for the discharges.
Holtec has also run into difficulties about decommissioning discharges in New York, where a state law passed in 2023 forbade putting treated wastewater into the Hudson River from the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, N.Y., another Holtec decommissioning project.
Holtec sued New York over the anti-discharge law, again claiming federal preemption.
