The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week notified Entergy that it is ready to carry out a full technical review of the utility’s request to transfer the license for the closed Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station to new planned owner NorthStar Group Services.
The April 6 letter cites the completion of the agency’s acceptance review of the Feb. 9 application from Entergy and NorthStar for the license transfer. The initial review is intended to determine whether the scope and depth of the technical data in the application is sufficient for the agency to conduct the comprehensive evaluation.
“The NRC staff has reviewed your application … and concluded that it does provide technical information in sufficient detail to enable the NRC staff to complete its detailed technical review and make an independent assessment regarding the acceptability of the request in terms of regulatory requirements and the protection of public health and safety and the environment,” Jack Parrott, senior project manager for the NRC’s Reactor Decommissioning Branch, wrote in the letter to Entergy Nuclear Operations President and CEO Christopher Bakken.
The Vermont Public Service Board must also approve the sale of Vermont Yankee, which shut down in December 2014 after more than four decades of operation. The companies hope to obtain NRC approval by the end of this year, while the state review could take about another year, Entergy Government Affairs Manager Joseph Lynch said by telephone Monday.
“Our reviews of a license transfer usually take about a year, but there are unique aspects to this proposal that may require more time,” NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said by email Monday.
Nuclear plant owners generally manage decommissioning after the facility closes, or in a couple instances have temporarily transferred the license to a cleanup contractor, Sheehan said. But the Vermont Yankee situation is uncommon in that NorthStar would buy the plant outright and determine how to use the property once decommissioning is complete.
The transfer would cover both the Vermont Yankee possession-only license and Entergy’s general license for the plant’s independent spent fuel storage installation, according to Parrott’s letter. Authority for possession, maintenance, and decommissioning would pass to NorthStar.
Parrott noted that agency staff might still need more data from Entergy as its review progresses.
“They’ll go through their process now of reviewing it in more detail, and over the time that it takes them to approve it, I’m sure they’ll be back and forth with questions, which again is very typical,” Lynch told RadWaste Monitor. “They’ll ask follow-up questions that aren’t clear in our submittal.”
NRC staff are expected in the next one to two months to participate in a meeting of the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel (NDCAP), Lynch said. In their request for a hearing, NDCAP members had asked the regulator to address the sale and license transfer, along with the updated post-shutdown decommissioning activities report filed late last week and the site-specific decommissioning cost estimate due at some point from NorthStar.
NorthStar would receive the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust fund, which held $571.5 million as of the end of February, as part of the deal. NorthStar’s proposed decommissioning plan should cost less than the amount held in the trust fund. NorthStar could keep nearly half of the remaining funds, though 55 percent would go back to the site’s original owner, Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp., and then likely to state ratepayers, VTDigger reported last year.
The sale price is a nominal amount of $1,000. If Entergy and NorthStar can meet their schedules, they would complete the deal by the end of 2018. NorthStar, a New York-based nuclear decommissioning specialist, would lead a team starting cleanup at Vermont Yankee by 2021 and complete work by 2030 – over four decades ahead of Entergy’s previous decommissioning schedule.
Wastewater Shipping
Meanwhile, the NRC is expected in the near future to decide whether to approve Entergy’s January 2016 request for approval to ship 200,000 gallons of low-activity radioactive wastewater to a treatment and disposal facility operated by US Ecology in southwestern Idaho.
The NRC, in an environmental assessment posted on the agency website last week, said it determined there would be “no significant impact” in what would be 40 truck shipments across the country. Such a finding indicates that staff is close to issuing a decision on the request itself, Sheehan said, though he did not cite a particular time frame.
The “process water” was used in operations at Vermont Yankee prior to its closure, including in cooling components. It has been filtered but cannot legally be discharged in the state, Lynch said. US Ecology would solidify the water with clay for disposal “as a soil-like waste,” according to the NRC.
The 200,000 gallons is a portion of roughly 885,000 gallons of process water stored in the “torus,” a containment structure under the plant’s reactor. All of it must be shipped off-site before decommissioning can begin, though some is currently used to help keep the spent fuel pool filled as some of that water evaporates, Lynch said.
Entergy has not determined whether it would send the process water to Idaho. Lynch described that option as a backup to another storage facility operated by EnergySolutions in Tennessee. The utility already has authorization to ship wastewater from Vermont Yankee to the EnergySolutions site, and in fact in recent years has shipped 498,000 gallons of groundwater that has intruded into the plant’s turbine building.
Shortly after Vermont Yankee shut down, Entergy shipped about 19,000 gallons of process water to the Tennessee facility. Lynch said he does not know if the company has a current contract with EnergySolutions to send more water south.
Having the US Ecology disposal facility available would help ensure that all wastewater is removed from Vermont Yankee’s storage tanks ahead of the expedited start of decommissioning, Lynch said.
“Really what it comes down to is time management,” he said. “Now that there is at least an opportunity or a proposed transaction to expedite and move up the decommissioning, there may be a near-term need to move up this water. So having both options available would allow us to move the water more quickly.”
