Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff last week approved the request from power company Entergy to use a facility in Idaho as a backup location for storage of wastewater from the shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
Staff at the regulator in April issued an environmental assessment that found there would be “no significant impact” in a plan to ship 200,000 gallons of low-activity radioactive wastewater by tanker trucks to a US Ecology treatment and disposal operation in southwestern Idaho. The NRC followed that with a safety evaluation, posted Wednesday on the agency’s website, that said staff had determined the material posed no threat to people or property and was not a security threat.
The 200,000 gallons covered by the NRC staff approval is a portion of roughly 885,000 gallons of process water that was used in operations at Vermont Yankee before its December 2014 closure. The water cannot be legally discharged in the state, and must be shipped off-site before decommissioning can begin for the nuclear plant.
Entergy still has no plans to send the wastewater to Idaho, Joseph Lynch, the company’s government affairs senior manager for decommissioning, said Wednesday by email. The preferred end site remains an EnergySolutions disposal facility in Tennessee.
There is as yet no schedule for shipping the wastewater off-site, Lynch said.
The EnergySolutions site at Oak Ridge as of this month had separately received 536,000 gallons of groundwater that had intruded into the Vermont Yankee plant’s turbine building.
Entergy has applied for approval from state and federal regulators to sell Vermont Yankee to New York-based NorthStar Group Services for decommissioning. The companies hope to complete the sale by the end of 2018, and NorthStar says it could complete decommissioning by 2030.
