An anti-nuclear watchdog’s agency-level effort to halt the sale of a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant is dead to rights after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted it down this week.
The three NRC commissioners voted unanimously during a Tuesday meeting to nix Three Mile Island Alert’s petition to reconsider the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station’s Unit 2 reactor for decommissioning.
EnergySolutions subsidiary TMI-2 Solutions, which purchased the reactor from FirstEnergy in 2019, expressed its frustration with the watchdog’s attempts to roll back the sale in an August filing and asked the commission to reject them. It’s the second time Three Mile Island Alert has appealed — NRC staff previously said that the commission didn’t have jurisdiction to rule on the watchdog’s appeal because regulatory proceedings about the Dauphin County, Pa. plant’s sale are closed.
Three Mile Island Alert has been on the offensive since February, when it accused TMI-2 Solutions and FirstEnergy of violating the Clean Water Act. The watchdog has argued that the plant’s license transfer didn’t include water quality certifications from interstate regulators required by law. Interstate regulatory body Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) investigated the issue and told RadWaste Monitor in July that it had discovered no evidence of illegality.
Now that NRC has tossed Three Mile Island Alert’s final appeal, the watchdog will sue the commission in federal court, president Eric Epstein told RadWaste Monitor in an email Tuesday evening. Epstein said that he hadn’t yet decided when he would file suit.
TMI-2 Solutions bought Three Mile Island Unit 2 in 2019. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Unit 2 shut down in 1979 after a partial core meltdown which resulted in one of the worst radiological releases in U.S. history.
