By John Stang
Entergy and Holtec International are at least a couple weeks behind schedule in submitting the license transfer application and associated paperwork for the proposed sale of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts.
In late September, the two companies said they anticipated they would in October deliver to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the application and several other documents, including two post-shutdown decommissioning activities reports and a revised used nuclear fuel plan.
An NRC spokesman said Tuesday the agency had been advised to expect the documents in mid-November. In discussing Entergy’s latest quarterly earnings on Wednesday, an executive said only that the submittal was planned by the end of 2018.
“These are very large and complex documents that need to be prepared and we want to make sure they are thorough and correct before submittal” Joy Russell, Holtec vice president for corporate business development, said by email.
The agency must approve the license transfer before Holtec can buy the 46-year-old single-reactor nuclear power plant from Entergy. The New Orleans-based power company plans to close Pilgrim by June 1, 2019, and to complete the sale during the same year. The new owner would then assume all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management on the property, and will possess the plant’s decommissioning trust fund.
Entergy said Wednesday the license transfer should proceed faster than the NRC’s recently completed review of a corresponding application for the company’s Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant following its December 2014 shutdown. The company and prospective buyer NorthStar Group Services filed the license transfer paperwork with the NRC in February 2017 and got the federal OK last month. They are still waiting on approval from a state regulatory panel and hope to complete the sale in 2019.
“[The] Vermont Yankee deal is kind of a first of a kind deal, so everybody was learning through that process, and certainly, the NRC was learning through the process, and we would expect that there would be some kind of learning curve associated with it,” Andrew Marsh, Entergy executive vice president and chief financial officer, said during a conference call on the company’s third-quarter earnings. “And so our current anticipation is that we would complete the Pilgrim process by the end of next year.”
Holtec and Entergy contend the sale will speed up decommissioning of the Pilgrim plant, the sole operational nuclear energy facility in Massachusetts.
If Entergy remains owner, the site would be largely dormant until 2075, with decommissioning operations scheduled from that year through 2083 and site restoration wrapping up the following year. Holtec, meanwhile, would complete decommissioning by 2027. Full license termination would occur in 2063 — after the Department of Energy meets its legal requirement to remove the spent nuclear reactor fuel — and then site restoration in 2064, the companies project.
Holtec is expected to hire Comprehensive Decommissioning International to conduct decommissioning. That entity is a new joint venture by the company with Canadian engineering corporation SNC Lavalin.
Entergy also plans to sell its Palisades Power Plant in Michigan to Holtec for decommissioning. That facility is due to be retired in 2022. “But if we would expect some time second half of 2022 is whenever we would be able to close that particular half of the transaction,” Marsh said.
The Indian Point plant in New York state is also likely to be sold off, Marsh said, though he did not cite Holtec as the anticipated buyer. Indian Point’s two operational reactors are scheduled for retirement in 2021 and 2022.
“[W]e’re receiving heightened interest because we’ve had success with Vermont Yankee on the NRC,” Marsh said during the conference call. “So we’re actually going to take some of the time to get the best deal we can, and we’re not going to probably talk about specifics of the process and where we are in the process as we go along.”
Lawmaker Calls for Tightened NRC Oversight of Pilgrim
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Tuesday urged the NRC to tighten oversight of Pilgrim in the aftermath of an unplanned outage that lasted from Oct. 5 to Oct. 15. The outage occurred automatically when a water valve closed unexpectedly, causing a drop in the reactor’s water level.
Pilgrim has been plagued by several unexpected shutdowns since 2015, including three in 2018 totaling at least 54 days due to winter storms, a transformer problem, and the water valve troubles.
“It is clear that Entergy’s modifications have not gone far enough to maintain safe operations at the plant during its last full calendar year of operation. Given Pilgrim’s status placement in Column 4 of the NRC’s Oversight Process Action Matrix — the lowest safety designation a plant can receive without being required to shut down — and its repetitive safety failures and unscheduled shut downs, it is deeply alarming that the NRC has not taken additional steps to ensure that Entergy is safely operating the Pilgrim plant,” Warren wrote in a letter to the agency.
The lawmaker said Entergy has lost $64 million in gross revenue and $32 million in net income so far this year due to the shutdowns. The NRC told Warren earlier this year that Entergy took sufficient measures to fix problems after the previous incidents.
“However, the NRC has consistently given Entergy a pass on implementing other key safety measures. … Time and time again, the NRC have ignored critical discrepancies in safety measures and put Massachusetts residents at risk.,” Warren wrote.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency will respond to Warren’s letter. The NRC has conducted an extensive inspection of Pilgrim over a period of years that led to an agreed-upon plan of fixes Entergy will make to addressed the weaknesses. The company has committted to bringing the site out of Column 4 before it shuts down.
“We have conducted thousands of hours of inspections at Pilgrim in the last year alone to evaluate safety at the site and efforts to improve performance,” Sheehan wrote. “The plant has also received ongoing attention from NRC senior management, including repeated visits to the facility and interactions with plant managers and personnel.”
