As a legal battle continues over the decommissioning of Indian Point Nuclear Generating Station, the company in charge of dismantling the plant took to local media last week to plead their case.
Decommissioning the Buchanan, N.Y. power plant could lead to a “rebirth and re-use” of the land it’s located on, bringing new jobs and tax revenue to the area, Holtec International communications executives Joe Delmar and Patrick O’Brien wrote over the weekend in the New York-based paper River Journal.
Holtec has been working with labor union offices to ensure there are “local, good paying jobs for decommissioning,” Delmar and O’Brien wrote. They’ve also agreed to honor existing labor agreements for employees currently working at Indian Point, which Entergy announced it was transferring to Holtec in 2019.
The Holtec executives told their readers that the nuclear services company has enough money to properly decommission the plant, and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission backs this claim up.
Holtec’s finances are at the center of complaints by watchdog groups, state and federal officials who want to take the brakes on the company’s acquisition of Indian Point.
A combined petition from New York state, the town of Cortlandt, N.Y., and environmental group Riverkeeper, Inc. against the NRC is currently making its way through the D.C. circuit court of appeals. Entergy and Holtec have also gotten involved in the proceedings.
The complaint takes issue with Holtec’s plan to use a $2.1 billion Indian Point decommissioning trust fund — something it needed special permission from the NRC to do — for activities outside the scope of decommissioning such as site remediation and spent fuel management. Holtec, the petitioners argue, doesn’t have enough money to adequately fund all of these tasks.
Holtec will assume ownership of Indian Point — a sale that the NRC approved last year — after Entergy finishes shutting down its Unit 3 reactor in April. Unit 3 is the last of the plant’s reactors to go offline. Unit 2 went dark late last year, and Unit 1 shut down in 1974.
