The president of a nuclear watchdog group said this week that his organization’s recent motion to hold the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station was “appropriate” after Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended that the agency scrap the request.
Eric Epstein, president of Three Mile Island Alert, said Wednesday that the group’s March 15 motion to hold the sale of Three Mile Island from Exelon to EnergySolutions subsidiary company TMI-2 Solutions followed appropriate protocol.
“I’m not asking for new content, it’s not even an appeal,” Epstein told RadWaste Monitor via phone. NRC staff said this week that the watchdog group made a procedural error in filing the motion and that the proceedings had already been settled.
Epstein said that NRC staff’s response was “cursory” and “based on protocol and procedure, not substance.” The watchdog group plans to respond within a week.
The commission also didn’t adequately address Three Mile Island Alert’s central complaint either, Epstein said.
“The critical aspect of this action is to prevent the disposal or dumping of radioactive water directly into the river,” Epstein said.
Three Mile Island Alert argued in its motion that the Dauphin County, Pa. plant’s sale violated a rule in the 1972 Clean Water Act that would require the company to get permission from regulators to ignore certain water quality standards. NRC staff said in their Monday response that no new “discharge” would be created during the plant’s decommissioning.
“Necessarily, as part of the decommissioning process, [Three Mile Island] will generate hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive water,” Epstein said. Decommissioning will “aggressively and physically disturb the condition” of the plant which will lead to discharges, he said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission are looking into whether any water-related violations took place at the plant. DEP, which is responsible for testing wastewater quality at and around the site, didn’t return a request for comment by deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor as to whether they would continue testing throughout the decommissioning process.
EnergySolutions first announced their intention to purchase the plant in 2019. Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 reactor famously shut down in 1979 after a partial core meltdown.
