U.S.
Power company Entergy reduced the workforce at its Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant to 136 employees on Thursday, down from 343 employees in January 2015, when the plant entered SAFSTOR decommissioning.
According to an Entergy press release, 80 employees either retired or left the company on Thursday, while 13 employees transferred to another Entergy facility. Of these 93 employees, 33 reside in Vermont, 36 in New Hampshire, and 24 in Massachusetts, according to the announcement.
These departures follow 64 employees who left the company between January 2015 and April 2016, as well as 50 employees who transferred to other facilities in that same span.
SAFSTOR is a form of decommissioning that allows the facility to sit dormant until its designated trust fund accrues enough interest to cover the cost of decommissioning. Entergy is scaling back the workforce as less staffing is required at the closed plant.
INTERNATIONAL
Contractors have begun work on the Port Granby storage facility in Ontario, Canada, a project that will involve relocating 450,000 cubic meters of historic low-level radioactive waste from the Lake Ontario shoreline.
Prime contractor Amec Foster Wheeler, which made the announcement Tuesday, has partnered with CB&I for the CDN $86.8 million contract the Port Hope Area Initiative (PHAI) awarded in July 2015. PHAI oversees long-term historic low-level waste projects for the Canadian government.
The Port Granby waste originated from uranium and radium refining activities completed by a former Crown corporation, Eldorado Nuclear, and its private sector predecessors between the 1930s and 1988.
The material will be stored over hundreds of years in an above-ground mound structure to be built about 700 meters north of the lake. Work will include waste excavation, construction of the facility, construction of a roadway to avoid using municipal roads for material transportation, and restoration of existing and new facility sites. The project is scheduled to wrap up in 2020, followed by long-term monitoring and maintenance.
“Our team plays an important role addressing this long-standing environmental issue safely by delivering this project to our customer’s requirements, while also supporting the community with economic opportunities,” Amec-CB&I Joint Venture Chairman Scott Anderson said in a statement.
The project will create regional economic benefits in the form of jobs, supplies, and services, as local subcontracts are awarded for construction activity and materials are purchased from local businesses, according to the announcement.
“Everything is now in place for us to start the clean-up phase of this important project,” PHAI General Manager Craig Hebert said in a statement. “Our contractor brings extensive international expertise to environmental projects such as this, and the PHAI has assembled a strong team to oversee the work with safety and environmental protection as our top priorities.”
Residents in Cumbria, England, will decide how money from the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning project will be funneled into community investment programs, the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) announced last week.
Described as a “radical crowd sourcing scheme,” this new method of handling Sellafield’s community investment budget is one of several changes taking place at the site after NDA took ownership of the property this year. Local groups will have the opportunity to propose work that would benefit the community, and the public will vote on which bids advance.
“The crowd sourcing element – which relates to the money generated as a result of excellent site performance – is a way of bringing the community into the decision making process. It’s a model similar to the very successful kickstarter format,” Sellafield Ltd. socioeconomics head Helen Fisher said in a statement. “It means that Cumbrians are generating the money – by doing their jobs well at Sellafield – and then taking ownership of where that money is spent, helping to make us a self-sufficient community.”
This change is in line with NDA’s attempt to have the Sellafield decommissioning feed economic benefit into the local economy. Earlier this year NDA announced a £500 million socioeconomic benefits package that is expected to create 1,140 jobs per year until 2025. Included in the agreement is the requirement that companies bidding for work at Sellafield show how they will support the community if they win. These commitments will be written into their contracts. The groups that have signed onto the agreement include Integrated Decommissioning Solutions, the Nexus Decommissioning Alliance, Cumbria Nuclear Solutions Ltd., and the Decommissioning Alliance.
