The members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday rejected requests for an immediate stay of agency staff’s approval of the license transfer for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts.
All four of the serving commissioners, without discussion, voted in favor of a memorandum and order upholding the earlier decision.
The staff order in August covering transfer of Pilgrim’s reactor and spent-fuel storage licenses allowed owner Entergy to sell the retired plant to Holtec International for decommissioning. The deal was completed on Aug. 26.
Both the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the local advocacy group Pilgrim Watch then asked the commission to stay the license transfer and a staff-approved regulatory exemption allowing Holtec to use the facility’s decommissioning trust fund for management of spent reactor fuel.
The two parties in February both filed petitions to intervene in the NRC license transfer, and their arguments in the stay request echo those in the earlier filings – including that Holtec cannot be assured of possessing sufficient financial means to complete decommissioning, and that transport of waste on local roads presents health, safety, and infrastructure dangers.
The commissioners were not swayed, saying the petitioners had not met the threshold for suffering “imminent, irreparable harm” if the stay is not approved. In its memorandum and order, the commission noted that it can still reverse the staff decision on the license transfer and exemption.
“[T]he staff’s order is not the agency’s final action on the license transfer and exemption request,” the order says. “This adjudicatory proceeding continues separate from the Staff’s review. The Staff’s order therefore remains subject to our authority to modify, condition, or rescind, depending on this proceeding’s outcome.”
The commission is also still considering the petitions from the Attorney General’s Office and Pilgrim Watch to intervene in the license transfer proceeding.
The Attorney General’s Office in September also petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reverse the license transfer and other approvals that enabled the sale to go through. That case remains pending.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office on Thursday declined to comment on the NRC decision. However, the ruling drew criticism from members of the commonwealth’s delegation to Congress.
“The residents around Pilgrim and the state of Massachusetts have real and substantive concerns about transferring the nuclear plant from one entity that had one of the worst safety records to another entity that has almost no experience decommissioning a power plant,” Sen. Ed Markey (D) said in a press release that also featured comments from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) and Rep. William Keating (D). “Instead of listening to the people of Massachusetts, the NRC continues to move forward with this license transfer without answering critical questions about safety, security, and funding. It’s time for the Commission to prioritize local issues over industry expediency.”
Entergy retired Pilgrim’s 47-year-old boiling-water reactor on May 31. In buying the property, Holtec assumed all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management. It also owns the plant’s decommissioning trust, a source of potential profit.
The New Jersey energy technology company says it can complete decommissioning and site restoration by the end of 2027. The on-site work is carried out by Comprehensive Decommissioning International, a Holtec joint venture with Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.
The company has also acquired, or made plans to acquire, nuclear plants in New Jersey, New York, and Michigan for decommissioning.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that Holtec met the required regulatory, legal, technical and financial requirements to qualify as licensee,” Holtec spokesman Joe Delmar said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “While we respect the petitioner’s rights to file legal motions, we are not going to comment on any specific legal motions or action.”
Pilgrim Decommissioning Completion Pushed Back Up To Three Years, Mass. AG Says
But Holtec has already added up to three years to its schedule for decommissioning Pilgrim, which could increase certain costs for the project by $102 million, according to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
The figures are based on a presentation Holtec gave last month to a local advisory panel for the decommissioning project, attorneys wrote in a Dec. 13 filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The commonwealth cited the presentation in making the case for permission to update the petition filed in February to intervene in the Pilgrim license transfer.
Holtec’s Nov. 14 presentation shows decommissioning operations primarily beginning in 2020, encompassing construction of a new used-fuel dry storage pad and transfer of the assemblies to the installation; site characterization; demolition preparations and teardown; segmentation of the reactor vessel; waste management; and site restoration.
Site restoration would be the last to start and would end at the tail end of 2027, the presentation says. Afterward, the site license would be limited to the spent-fuel storage pad. That would remain until the radioactive material finds an off-site home – potentially the centralized spent-fuel storage facility Holtec wants to build in southeastern New Mexico.
In documents submitted to the federal regulator in November 2018, Holtec laid out a five-and-a-half-year schedule for completing that work, according to the latest Massachusetts filing. The new presentation pushes that to the right by two-and-a-half to three years, it adds.
“Holtec’s estimated project management and overhead costs for these activities is $34 million,” the Attorney General’s Office said. “Using this cost for the additional two to three-and-a-half years, Holtec’s announced schedule delay could add in added decommissioning cost of at least $85 million to $102 million for project management and overhead alone.”
The NRC declined to comment on the new motion from Massachusetts.
Holtec has said the decommissioning trust it acquired from Entergy would hold over $1 billion when the license transfer was completed. It expects the fund will have $200 million left when decommissioning and site restoration are complete.
