The commonwealth of Massachusetts’ court challenge to the transfer of the federal license for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is being dismissed with prejudice, which would prevent it from being refiled.
The parties to the petition for review filed the dismissal agreement on June 30 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. They are the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and facility owner Holtec International.
The filing arrived about two weeks after the announcement of a settlement agreement in which Massachusetts withdrew its objections to Holtec’s 2019 acquisition of the retired single-reactor plant on Cape Cod from power company Entergy.
The agreement is intended to address the commonwealth government’s concerns about the sale, including ensuring Holtec retains sufficient funds to complete decommissioning of the facility. Among the terms: Holtec cannot allow the trust fund that will pay for decommissioning to dip below $193.3 million for most of the cleanup job; it would have 30 days to replenish the account if that happens.
Entergy and Holtec applied in November 2018 for the transfer of the NRC operations and spent-fuel storage licenses for Pilgrim, with approval necessary for the deal to proceed. The following February, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and local advocacy group Pilgrim Watch petitioned the agency for hearings in the licensing proceeding. The commission approved the license transfers in August 2019 without ruling on the intervention petitions, and the sale concluded within days.
Holtec has since begun decommissioning the facility, with work scheduled to wrap up in 2027. It would retain some percentage of the roughly $1 billion decommissioning trust after completion.
The commonwealth then took the case to federal court, asking a judge to force the NRC to undo the license transfer order and other measures that allowed the sale to proceed. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and Holtec initiated settlement talks.
The commission was scheduled on June 4 to finally rule on the petitions from Massachusetts and Pilgrim Watch, but held off to allow time for settlement talks to conclude. Massachusetts subsequently withdrew its contentions.
Pilgrim Watch is not a party to the settlement, and has not dropped its petition for a hearing.
“Pilgrim Watch was not part of the settlement discussions or the final agreement. Our filings with the NRC were separate from the AGO’s,” Director Mary Lampert said by email Monday. “Although we filed many similar claims, there also were differences. We appreciate that the Commonwealth did the best it could in the Settlement but it had few cards to play. Therefore, the issues that we brought forward in our motions to NRC remain. We look forward to NRC’s response to our requests for hearing.”
The commission will address Pilgrim Watch’s petition in an upcoming memorandum and order, though a schedule was not immediately available, NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said by email Monday.
The Army Corps of Engineers has slimmed the annual funding expected to be available for the next contract for cleanup of the Luckey Site in Ohio under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).
In a second set of responses to vendor questions on the procurement, posted online Wednesday, the Army Corps said contractors should “Assume a funding limitation of no greater than $27M annually will be available for the contract.” That was down from $30 million cited when the bid notice was issued June 17.
Bids are being accepted through Aug. 5 for remediation of the radioactively contaminated 40-acre property about 20 miles southwest of Toledo. The contractor is expected to be selected in August 2021. This is intended to be the last cleanup contract at Luckey.
The Luckey Site housed beryllium processing for national defense from 1949 to 1961, which left behind beryllium, lead, and other contaminants in the soil and groundwater. A warehouse and some other infrastructure also remain.
The job will primarily involve extraction and off-site disposal of soil, sediment, debris, and fill, the procurement notice says. As of June 5, 35% of excavation had been completed, encompassing 65,445 cubic yards of soil.
The current contractor is North Wind Portage.
The 46-year-old Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program cleans up properties contaminated by nuclear weapons and nuclear power operations from the 1940s to 1960s under the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission. There were 23 active sites in 10 states as of 2019.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May spent $2,859 from its remaining Nuclear Waste Fund balance, breaking its streak of using next-to-nothing from the account intended to pay for the repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Since early 2019, the regulator had each month spent a few hundred dollars on unspecified program planning and support. It applied $282 toward that work in May, but also $2,577 for knowledge management reports, according to the Nuclear Waste Fund update submitted to Congress on July 1.
That represented a payment to the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses, based in San Antonio, which supported NRC staff in developing the reports, according to agency spokesman David McIntyre. The reports were largely published from October 2010 to September 2011, with a handful from November 2016 to the following September. “The KM reports were designed to capture the work staff and the Center did on the review of the application,” on technical topics such as calculating seismic fragility curves and tectonic models, McIntyre said by email.
The May spending leaves an unobligated carryover balance of $421,705. The full balance is $$427,225, but the agency owes $5,520 on contracts to the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.
The Nuclear Waste Fund was established under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to pay for a geologic repository for U.S. high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. Congress in 1987 amended the bill to direct the waste to the federal property about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008 received the license application for Yucca Mountain from the Department of Energy, during the George W. Bush administration. The Barack Obama administration defunded the licensing proceeding two years later, but a federal appeals court in August 2013 ordered the NRC to resume its work on the application.
The regulator at the time had slightly more than $13.5 million in carryover from the fund. It has since spent just over $13.1 million of that. The leading expenses were nearly $8.4 million to complete a safety evaluation report on the project, almost $1.6 million on a supplement to the draft environmental impact statement, and over $1.1 million to transfer documents related to licensing into the NRC’s public documents database.
It seems unlikely Congress will appropriate additional money from the Nuclear Waste Fund for the agency anytime soon. The Trump administration proposed in three consecutive budget plans to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain, but was rebuffed each time on Capitol Hill. For the upcoming fiscal 2021, it is asking only for $27.5 million at the Energy Department for work focused on centralized, interim storage of radioactive waste.
A nuclear medicine specialist is taking over as head of BWX Technologies’ medical isotope business after a stint as an adviser to a rival company.
Martyn Coombs will on July 20 succeed Tom Burnett as president of BWXT ITG Canada, according to a press release Monday. Burnett is retiring.
Coombs will assume profit and loss responsibility for BWXT’s existing medical isotope business, which encompasses operations in Kanata, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia. He will also be charged with managing the launch of the company’s technetium-99m production, the press release states.
The isotope, generated through the decay of molybdenum-99, is used widely in medical imaging.
BWX Technologies in 2018 established the new branch – also known as BWXT Isotope Technologies — within the parent company’s Nuclear Power Group, following acquisition of the Nordion medical isotope business of Sotera Health.
In May, BWXT President and CEO Rex Geveden said the company anticipated beginning commercial output of molybdenum-99 by the middle of 2022. That remains the schedule, a company spokesperson said this week.
Geveden acknowledged challenges that have in recent years have slowed standing up of its neutron-capture production system – In June 2018, management believed production would start by the close of 2019, while in 2019 it previewed first sales by the first quarter of 2021. He cited “programmatic challenges,” along with more recent supply chain slowdowns as suppliers temporarily closed plants during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“Martyn has significant experience within both the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors, particularly in nuclear medicine, and has a successful track record in leading organizations and teams through transformation and innovation,” Geveden said in this week’s release. “We are very pleased to have someone of Martyn’s caliber join BWXT to lead this growing and critical segment of our business.”
Coombs was most recently CEO of nuclear medicine consultancy Predict Ltd., according to his LinkedIn profile. In that position he served as a part-time strategic adviser to SHINE Medical Technologies, a Wisconsin company that is pursuing its own molybdenum-99 business. Coombs started in that role in early 2017; SHINE did not respond to a query this week regarding when the business arrangement ended.
Coombs previously served in the top executive spots at companies including medical imaging company ImaginAb and nuclear medicine specialist Jubilant DraxImage.
From The Wires
From the Los Angeles Times: Department of Energy report says nuclear waste repository on Marshall Islands is safe, but concerns remain about deteriorating facility.
