NorthStar Group Services said last week it plans to acquire the Vallecitos Nuclear Center, in Sunol, Calif., from General Electric Hitachi, adding four reactors to the privately held company’s decommissioning fleet.
As of Monday, privately held NorthStar, New York, had not filed for a license transfer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Neither NorthStar nor General Electric (GE) Hitachi have disclosed the terms of the proposed deal.
The San Francisco Bay Area Vallecitos complex, about 15 miles by road from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, includes three shuttered reactors: the 1950s-vintage Vallecitos Boiling Water Reactor, the General Electric Test Reactor and the ESADA Vallecitos Experimental Superheat Reactor. GE Hitachi is already decommissioning those reactors, the company said in its own press release about the deal.
A fourth Vallecitos reactor, the Nuclear Test Reactor, was still operating as of Monday. GE Hitachi in December estimated it would cost about $6.5 million to decommission this reactor.
“As with its other ongoing nuclear decommissioning projects, NorthStar anticipates being able to dispose of low-level radioactive waste from the Vallecitos decommissioning at the disposal facility operated by NorthStar affiliate Waste Control Specialists, LLC in Andrews County, Texas,” the company wrote in the press release.
The long-shuttered Vallecitos Boiling Water Reactor closed down in 1963, according to the NRC’s website. GE Hitachi, after unsuccessfully petitioning the NRC to keep the mothballed reactor in SAFSTOR stasis in 2015, started decommissioning the reactor in 2021. NorthStar will now take over that work. NRC lets reactors remain in SAFSTOR for 60 years after they shut down.
NorthStar is majority owned by the New York-based private equity firm J.F. Lehman and Co. NorthStar affiliates are also decommissioning the Crystal River 3 reactor complex in Citrus County, Fla., and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt.
