Entergy Nuclear’s announcement Tuesday that it plans to sell its Vermont Yankee plant to subsidiaries of NorthStar Group Services Inc. “to accelerate decommissioning and site restoration by decades” came under immediate criticism from opponents who fear a “dirty and cheap” cleanup of the Vernon reactor.
The New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, which has intervened legally against Vermont Yankee since before its 1972 startup, said Friday it’s poised to do so again “to advocate for best-practices radiological cleanup” of the site “and state-of-the-art nuclear fuel waste storage and protection.”
Entergy will also seek to transfer its U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses to NorthStar, of New York, and has announced plans to accelerate by two years transfer of all spent nuclear fuel to dry cask storage to 2018. That expedited schedule is contingent on NRC approval of license amendment requests by dry-storage manufacturer Holtec International.
Entergy’s sale — expected to be complete by the end of 2018 — depends on a license transfer by the NRC and approval by the Vermont Public Service Board. Also, Entergy and NorthStar will ask the Public Service Board to approve “proposed site restoration standards that are generally consistent with those of other regional decommissioning projects,” the plant’s owner said.
“By accelerating decommissioning, we are fulfilling a commitment we made in 2013 to decommission Vermont Yankee as soon as reasonably possible,” said Bill Mohl, Entergy Wholesale Commodities president.
NorthStar plans to partner with the firms Areva, Waste Control Specialists and Burns & McDonnell to perform specialized services “drawing on each company’s core competencies,” Entergy said.
Areva will be responsible for reactor work and spent fuel management support, while Kansas City-based Burns & McDonnell will handle engineering and regulatory support. Waste Control Specialists, of Dallas, with a radioactive waste disposal site in Texas, will be in charge of the Vermont plant’s “waste management, packaging, transportation and disposal.”
The French multinational Areva lists among its nuclear decommissioning projects the reactor-vessel segmentation and packaging at the Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe, Maine Yankee and Millstone 1 as well as used fuel and waste management at Connecicut Yankee and Japan’s Fukushima plants.
But Deborah Katz, president of Citizens Awareness Network, called the proposed sale “a rabbit-in-a-hat trick … a way of letting Entergy off the hook. I understand why people would like to see NorthStar as the knight on a white horse coming in to save the situation. But this is a fantasy. If Entergy couldn’t clean the site up with the limited decommissioning funds, then you’ve got to ask yourself how is North Star going to do it, and do it in a very short period of time?”
Katz said the deal “has the potential to be dirty and cheap.”
The nuclear decommissioning trust fund for Vermont Yankee totals $575 million. Of the overall $1.2 billion estimated in overall decommissioning costs, $143 million is projected for the ongoing moving of spent fuel to dry cask.
New England Coalition trustee Clay Turnbull said “We feel like if we don’t bring added truth to power, who will? … We will likely intervene in the current round of VY post-license matters.”
He added, “We have a strong record of introducing legal and technical considerations that have moved decisions toward better protection of the human and natural environment.”