By John Stang
A year into the first-of-its-kind arrangement, decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant appears to be proceeding smoothly, according to the head of a local citizens organization.
NorthStar Group Services completed the purchase of Vermont Yankee from power company Entergy in January. The New York City-based demolition specialist assumed ownership of all responsibility for remediating and tearing down the plant, restoring the property, and managing its spent fuel. It also owns the trust fund to pay for decommissioning, keeping some profit when the work is complete
Similar business contracts are in play for several retired and soon-to-close nuclear power plants around the country, by an increasing number of companies. However, Vermont Yankee is the only one where significant decommissioning has begun.
“There’s been no surprises about decommissioning so far. We’re very happy with it so far,” said Josh Unruh, chairman of the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizen’s Advisory Panel.
“We’re roughly on schedule,” NorthStar CEO Scott State added in an interview with RadWaste Monitor.
New Orleans-based Entergy retired Vermont Yankee’s single boiling-water reactor in December 2014 after 42 years of operation. In 2016, Entergy announced its intention to sell the site to NorthStar. That sale was finalized in January 2019.
Decommissioning is managed by a new NorthStar subsidiary, NorthStar Vermont Yankee. NorthStar says it can complete decommissioning and site restoration as early as 2026, and no later than 2030, compared to the prior Entergy cleanup schedule that stretched on as late as 2068. Currently, NorthStar is tackling studies of the site’s contamination, removing asbestos, and preparing for demolition of the plant’s cooling tower and turbines.
Overall, decommissioning will involve tearing down the buildings and equipment, digging up contaminated soil to ship to Texas with the other debris, taking care of spent fuel until it can be shipped off-site, and restoring the area until it is essentially a field.
Unruh said the panel’s and the public’s chief concern when NorthStar assumed ownership of Vermont Yankee was whether the trust fund had enough money to cover decommissioning. “I think that concern has been put to rest,” he said.
In a Dec. 12 letter, Vermont Department of Public Service Commissioner June Tierney told state Rep. Laura Sibilia (I), a member of the advisory panel, that cleanup is estimated to cost $498 million for radioactive-related decommissioning, $288 million for spent nuclear fuel management, and slightly more than $25 million for site restoration — a total of $811 million.
State officials told the advisory panel on Dec. 5 that Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning trust fund holds almost $436 million for radioactive-related work, with nearly $63 million set aside for site restoration and other non-radioactive-related work. That is a total of $499 million. Roughly 20 percent of the funds have been spent so far, State said.
“There is no settled answer as to what happens if the decommissioning funding proves inadequate. This is why significant measures were taken by state and federal regulators in reviewing and approving the sale to NorthStar to guard against any decommissioning funding inadequacy,” Tierney wrote to Sibilia.
In its letter, Tierney said if NorthStar ultimately falls short of funds during the decommissioning, the state will likely seek the remaining money from the company through the courts.
NorthStar and its corporate partners have agreed to six financial assurances as backup to the decommissioning trust. These are: a $30 million legal liability policy; a $140 million support agreement from NorthStar’s corporate parent, NorthStar Group Holdings; a $30 million escrow account; $10 million and $40 million expected from current litigation with the U.S. Department of Energy; and a $25 million guaranty from Orano USA relating to decommissioning on the reactor vessel.
Orano, the domestic branch of French nuclear company Orano (formerly AREVA) is handling much of the segmentation and removal of the reactor and reactor vessel building. NorthStar’s other major subcontractor is Waste Control Specialists, which will haul debris to its disposal complex in Andrews County, Texas.
The only bump during the actual decommissioning, according to Unruh, was when NorthStar announced in December that groundwater and soil monitoring showed 17 “areas of concern,” with five needing extra remediation, Most of that contamination came from diesel fuel or fuel oil located near underground pipes or a diesel tank that provided fuel to some backup generators. Some of the contamination was due to firefighting foam found in the soil.
The areas of concern and extra pollution were not surprising to local residents, as the Vermont state government had already been monitoring potential contaminated spots at Vermont Yankee, Unruh said.
“We confirmed things that we anticipated finding,” State said. Cleanup of the extra contamination is underway, he added. The next round of studies of what needs to be done are due to be completed in the first quarter of 2020.
NorthStar is employing 80 to 100 people at the site, including those working for subcontractors — a range that it expects to retain for the duration of the decommissioning.
In 2020, NorthStar plans to remove a few buildings plus the site’s off-gas system that collects internal gases from the reactor. The turbine building is set to be torn down in 2021. The three-year project of tearing down the reactor systems and building is due to begin in 2022.
All of Vermont Yankee’s spent fuel — 58 casks with roughly 3,000 fuel assemblies — is in dry storage. That radioactive material will remain in Vermont until an off-site location is found for temporary storage or permanent disposal. The Department of Energy is legally responsible for disposal of used fuel from nuclear power plants, but does not yet have a repository. Waste Control Specialists is partnering with Orano to license and build a facility for consolidated interim storage of that material, with the Energy Department or nuclear utilities as its customer.
NorthStar and Orano have separately established their own business, Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, to buy and decommission other nuclear power plants. Its first contract, a $450 million award for the Crystal River site in Florida, is a more straightforward pay-for-work job, partly because the property is part of a larger complex owned by Duke Energy.
Since the Vermont Yankee deal went through, energy technology firm Holtec International has jumped aggressively into the decommissioning model. It has bought nuclear plants in New Jersey and Massachusetts (facing intense pushback on the latter deal for the retired Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station) and is lining up similar acquisitions in New York state and Michigan.
Nuclear services provider EnergySolutions, of Salt Lake City, in July announced its first move into the buy-and-decommissioning business: for reactor Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania.
