One of the nuclear industry’s main trade groups planned to host a new conference for nuclear power plant decommissioning companies, an executive with the group told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Tuesday in a public meeting.
“We’re targeting January, February 2024 to have a conference,” Bruce Montgomery, director of decommissioning and used fuel at the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) told NRC staff at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md., during a joint government-industry meeting titled “Decommissioning Lessons Learned.”
Montgomery said the planed NEI-sponsored meeting would focus on “the nuts and bolts” of decommissioning. “No need to talk strategies and so forth anymore because those are pretty set. Now into how to get it done. And we want to have a strong international component to that conference as well.”
Montgomery did not say where NEI planned to hold the conference, which will notionally be a two-track affair: one to focus on project management, another to focus on the technical aspects of power plant decommissioning.
In recent years, the industry has moved to what is known broadly as the asset transfer model for decommissioning nuclear power plants. Instead of operators shutting a plant down and waiting as many as sixty years before dismantling it, asset transfer involves selling a plant to a dedicated decommissioning company.
Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., and Energy Solutions, Salt Lake City, have emerged as leaders in asset-transfer nuclear-plant decommissioning.
