The company in charge of decommissioning a nuclear power plant in Vermont has finished packaging the last of the site’s low-level waste, a spokesperson said this week.
NorthStar, which is currently dismantling Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, “has reached another milestone” in the decommissioning process, as the site’s Greater-Than-Class-C waste “has been loaded into a dry cask and transferred to the site’s Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation [ISFSI] for storage,” a spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via email Tuesday.
Greater than Class C (GTCC) waste is a type of low-level radioactive waste which includes things such as activated metals from power plants and manufacturing waste from radioisotope products.
The NorthStar spokesperson also said that the last shipments of the Vernon, Vt., plant’s reactor vessel components have arrived at Waste Control Specialists’ (WCS) low-level waste disposal facility in Texas and have been “placed in disposal.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently at work drafting a new rulemaking that would allow states to consent to store GTCC in near-surface repositories, such as the federal Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or the WCS facility, as opposed to a permanent storage facility such as Nevada’s moribund Yucca Mountain site.
Some NRC staff oppose that proposed rules change, reasoning in a 2020 policy brief that only the federal government can legally bear responsibility for GTCC waste.
NorthStar purchased Vermont Yankee from former operator Entergy in 2018, and the company has said it could wrap decommissioning by 2030 or so. The plant stores around 58 casks of spent nuclear fuel on its ISFSI.
