The Vermont Public Service Department has scheduled a number of depositions as part of the state’s ongoing review of the sale of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
The sale of the shuttered facility from power company Entergy to NorthStar Group Services for decommissioning requires approval both from the Vermont Public Utility Commission and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The state panel is now conducting an extensive discovery process including submission of documents and prefiled testimony from executives from the two companies, topic experts, and representatives from organizations authorized to intervene in the review of the sale. The upcoming depositions will offer further insight into the earlier testimony, said Stephanie Hoffman, special counsel to the Public Service Department.
The depositions are scheduled for the first two weeks of October, primarily at law offices in Boston and in Vernon and Montpelier, Vt. Among those scheduled to give depositions are NorthStar CEO Scott State; NorthStar Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Adix; Michael Twomey, vice president for external affairs with Entergy Wholesale Commodities; Robert Spencer, chairman of the town of Vernon Planning and Economic Development Commission; and Todd Smth, president of TSSD Services.
While the state recently extended the schedule for its review of the sale, the current and prospective owners still hope to complete the deal by the end of next year. “The Joint Petitioners have requested a decision by March 2018, but the [Public Utility] Commission has not indicated when it will issue a decision,” Hoffman told RadWaste Monitor by email. “The Commission issues a Final Order approving or not the sale after determining whether it promotes the public good.”
NorthStar says it can complete decommissioning no later than 2030, and possibly as early as 2026; that would be decades earlier than Entergy had planned after closing the facility in the town of Vernon in December 2014.
The buyer would pay a nominal $1,000 for the plant, and would assume control of the decommissioning and site restoration trust funds for Vermont Yankee – which it estimates would hold no less than $538.5 million when the deal closes. NorthStar has projected the cost of decommissioning, site restoration, and management of spent fuel at just over $811 million. The companies expect the remaining funds to come from growth in the trust funds and “DOE recoveries” – settlements in lawsuits filed against the Department of Energy for failing to meet its legal mandate to take control of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear plants and place it in a permanent repository.
Any funds remaining in the trusts would be NorthStar’s once it completes cleanup operations. A wild card to the schedule would be shipping the plant’s spent fuel off-site: there are still no licensed interim or permanent storage sites for used nuclear fuel, and strong opposition to the Trump administration’s plan to revive development of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
NorthStar’s capacity to meet its decommissioning targets for Vermont Yankee, and the means by which it does so, has been of intense interest in Vermont. Public Service Department consultant Gregory Maret, in testimony filed last month (as first reported this week in VT Digger), discussed the potential use of explosives in demolition of a radioactively contaminated structure at the plant. NorthStar pushed back against that claim.
In his own prefiled testimony, the Vernon Planning and Economic Development Commission’s Spencer urged the state to require the nuclear plant property be remediated to the point that it can be put to “unrestricted residential” use. That would run counter to the request of another intervenor in the sale, the nongovernmental New England Coalition, that the site be designated as a nature preserve that would not be developed in any fashion.
“We strongly object to such a proposal,” Spencer said.
