The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this week it has reduced the liability insurance requirements for both on-site and off-site damage at the retired Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts.
The agency issued the regulatory exemptions to subsidiaries of plant owner Holtec International on Jan. 6, according to separate notices Monday and Tuesday in the Federal Register.
The first exemption allows Holtec Pilgrim and Holtec Decommissioning International to reduce the level of primary off-site liability insurance from $450 million to $100 million and to forgo secondary financial protection. The other authorizes the company to cut on-site property damage insurance from $1.06 billion to $50 million.
Both are predicated on the reduction in risk posed by a nuclear power plant following retirement and defueling, according to the NRC.
“Most of the accident scenarios postulated for operating power reactors involve failures or malfunctions of systems that could affect the fuel in the reactor core, which in the most severe postulated would involve the release of large quantities of fission products,” the regulator said in its Jan. 13 notice regarding off-site liability insurance. “With the permanent cessation of reactor operations at Pilgrim and the permanent removal of the fuel from the reactor core, such accidents are no longer possible.”
Then-owner Entergy requested the regulatory exemptions on March 25, 2019. It then shut down Pilgrim’s 47-year-old boiling water reactor on May 31 and defueled the facility by June 10. Following NRC staff approval of the transfer of the site’s reactor and spent-fuel storage licenses, Entergy sold the facility to Holtec on Aug. 26.
The New Jersey energy technology company is now responsible for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management at the Cape Cod property. Holtec says it can complete cleanup by 2027, with the work carried out by its joint venture with Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin, Comprehensive Decommissioning International.
Pilgrim is one of several power plants Holtec has bought or plans to buy. In each case, it anticipates retaining some portion of a facility’s decommissioning trust fund once decommissioning is complete.
The company in July 2019 bought Exelon’s Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey and has announced its intention to acquire two more plants from Entergy: the Indian Point Energy Center in New York state and the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan.
The commonwealth of Massachusetts and local advocacy group Pilgrim Watch in February 2019 both requested hearings at the NRC to raise concerns about the Pilgrim deal, including whether Holtec has sufficient funds to complete decommissioning. The commission has yet to rule on those petitions, but it could still reverse the staff approval of the license transfers and approve the intervention requests.
In December, the four NRC commissioners rejected Massachusetts’ request for an immediate stay of the license transfers.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office in September also petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reverse the NRC license transfer and other approvals that enabled the sale of Pilgrim. That case is ongoing. However, the commonwealth on Jan. 10 withdrew its motion for a stay of the actions pending the court’s decision on the overarching petition.
“Based on its further review, the Commonwealth has concluded that the Commission’s December 17 order denying the Commonwealth’s application to the agency for a stay has altered the pre-existing circumstances to such an extent as to have rendered the Commonwealth’s Stay Motion in this Court largely obsolete,” Seth Schofield, senior appellate counsel in the Attorney General’s Office Energy and Environment Bureau, wrote in a memo to the court.
The commonwealth, though, could file another stay motion at a later date, Schofield stated.
