By John Stang
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Petition Review Board recently agreed to review a request to determine whether FirstEnergy Solutions should be found in breach of its federal requirement to ensure it can fund decommissioning of three nuclear power plants scheduled for closure in coming years.
The NRC sent a memo to that effect on Aug. 2 to the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center.
“Notably, they accepted ELPC’s petition in entirety—no parts of it were rejected. The next step is for the PRB to substantively review the petition and come up with recommendations for action, which it will send to the director (of the NRC). The director ultimately makes the final decision on what actions, if any, the NRC will take against the licensee,” the organization said on its Web site.
No information was available this week on how long the process is likely to take. The appropriate ELPC official was not available for comment.
FirstEnergy Solutions on March 28 announced it would shut down three nuclear power plants it says are no longer economically viable: the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio, Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Ohio, and Beaver Valley Power Station in Pennsylvania between May 2020 and October 2021. Three days later, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
At the same time, the Environmental Law & Policy Center sent a petition to the NRC asserting that FirstEnergy’s nuclear decommissioning trusts and parent company guarantees could not be counted on to cover the costs for cleaning up the four reactors at the three plants. It noted FirstEnergy’s financial troubles and said external trust funds as of March 2017 were $350 million short of the estimated $2.1 billion projected cost of decommissioning the three sites.
The situation puts the power company in breach of federal rules intended to ensure nuclear plant owners have the money to clean them up once they shut down, according to the petition.
Specifically, the NRC should find FirstEnergy Solutions and its subsidiaries to be operating nuclear sites without sufficient decommissioning funds, and then fine them and suspend the licenses for the three power facilities, the petition charged. It should also demand the FirstEnergy companies be required to provide site-specific decommissioning funding plans for the three plants, along with information on external trust funds and parent guarantees that would pay for the work, the petition said.
FirstEnergy Solutions declined to comment specifically on the NRC Petition Review Board decision. It referred RadWaste Monitor to an Aug. 6 NRC memo that said licensees for the 100 U.S. operating power reactors had “demonstrated decommissioning funding
assurance” in their 2017 decommissioning funding status reports.
FirstEnergy is also seeking federal and state assistance to keep the nuclear power plants operational. Most notably, the company asked Energy Secretary Rick Perry to order a regional power clearinghouse to financially bolster the company enough to keep its reactors and other power plants online. The Akron, Ohio, company wants the clearing house — PJM Interconnection — to sign contracts that guarantee FirstEnergy’s nuclear and coal plants can fully recover their costs along with a return on their investments. So far, the U.S. Department of Energy has not taken stance on FirstEnergy’s request.
The corporation also contends it needs help from the state governments of Ohio and Pennsylvania to keep the reactors operating. So far, the Pennsylvania legislature has not introduced any bills to that effect. A bill in Ohio’s legislature to allow FirstEnergy to charge customers extra to keep the reactors operating died in committee earlier this year.
Should the three power plants close, FirstEnergy plans to place them into SAFSTOR, an approach for decommissioning in which the site owner does not have to complete cleanup for up to six decades. That allows time for radioactivity levels to decrease and for decommisioning funds to grow.
