By John Stang
The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts was preparing to permanently shut down Friday, ahead of what its owner and prospective buyer hope will be a rapid decommissioning.
“#FYI Tomorrow, Friday, May 31, control room operators at @PilgrimNuclear Power Station will shut down the reactor for the final time,” Entergy tweeted on Thursday. “Its closure is a step toward @Entergy’s exit from the merchant power market and return to a pure-play utility.”
At deadline for RadWaste Monitor, the five-hour shutdown procedure had not yet begun, but it was still on track to be accomplished Friday, according to Entergy spokesman Patrick O’Brien. The 690-megawatt boiling water reactor was operating at 40 percent capacity entering Friday.
Entergy hopes by the end of the year to sell the Cape Cod property to Holtec International, which would assume all responsibility for cleanup and spent fuel management, along with the trust fund that will pay for the work.
Boston Edison built the plant, bringing it online in 1972. It sold the facility to Entergy for $80 million in 1999. In 2015, the New Orleans-based power company announced it would retire Massachusetts’ last nuclear power plant by June 1 of this year, saying increasing operating costs and competition with natural gas as a power source had made the facility economically unviable.
In November 2018, Energy and Holtec filed their license transfer application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The federal agency is expected to take nine to 12 months to review that request. Without approval, the sale cannot proceed.
Holtec, via a joint venture with Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, says it can largely complete decommissioning by 2026 — decades ahead of Entergy’s previous plan of keeping the site dormant until 2075 and then tackling decommissioning through 2083. That approach – covering decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management – had been projected to cost $1.6 billion.
That would leave only dry storage of spent reactor fuel, which by law the Department of Energy must remove for disposal. But that could take years or even decades to accomplish.
Friday’s shutdown is expected to be followed by removal of the remaining fuel from the reactor and the construction of a second dry storage pad on the site. The existing pad does not have enough space to hold all of Pilgrim’s fuel, O’Brien said.
There are 4,114 fuel assemblies at Pilgrim, of which 1,156 are in dry storage in 17 casks. Another 580 assemblies remain in the still-active reactor and 2,378 assemblies are in the plant’s cooling pool.
The companies say the decommissioning trust for Pilgrim would have more than $1 billion at the time of license transfer, and that over $200 million would remain when spent fuel management is the only work that remains.
The commonwealth of Massachusetts and watchdog group Pilgrim Watch have both petitioned to intervene in the NRC review of the license transfer application for Pilgrim. They argue the Entergy and Holtec have not shown there is enough money to pay for decommissioning in the event of unexpected developments, as demanded by law, and that the companies have not performed the necessary environmental evaluations for the license transfer. There are also concerns about the involvement of SNC-Lavalin, which is embroiled in a bribery scandal in its home nation.
Holtec and Entergy have opposed the petitions.
From 2015 to early this year, Pilgrim was in Column 4 of the agency’s Action Matrix, the lowest ranking allowed for a nuclear power facility to continue operating, following unplanned shutdowns and other operational problems. Under intense NRC scrutiny, Entergy starting in August 2017 carried out 156 corrective actions. In March, the NRC raised it to Column 1 of the Action Matrix —the highest ranking.
Holtec, an energy technology company based in Camden, N.J., is also planning separate acquisitions for two other Entergy sites: the Palisades Power Plant in Michigan, due for retirement in 2022, and the three-reactor Indian Point site in New York in 2021 after its final reactor shuts down. It also aims to buy Exelon’s newly closed Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey.
