An AREVA Nuclear Materials-NorthStar Group Services joint venture no longer expects to seal the deal in 2017 on its first acquisitions of nuclear plants for decommissioning, an executive said this week.
The two companies in February announced the formation of Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, which would buy closed nuclear plants and take charge of decommissioning, site restoration, and used fuel management. Executives acknowledged earlier this year the new company was in talks to buy Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts and Palisades Power Plant in Michigan.
“It won’t be this year,” Geoff Wilde, site acquisitions director for both ADP and AREVA D&D, told RadWaste Monitor on Monday. He could not say when the sales might be finalized.
“It had to do with a lot of the timing of working with the utility, but also I think the utility, Entergy, was having another look at Palisades in light of the timing there,” Wilde said.
Entergy had planned to shut down the single-reactor Palisades facility in October 2018, but last week pushed that back to spring 2022 following the mutual termination of a deal for Michigan utility Consumers Energy to buy the agreement under which it currently purchases power from the plant.
Pilgrim remains on schedule to close on May 31, 2019.
Wilde indicated ADP is taking the change in stride, saying four years is not long within the lifetime of a nuclear plant and a decommissioning timeline that can stretch for decades. He noted that the planned deal with Entergy had originally included the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York, which also got a new lease of life via a zero-emissions credit program from the state and a sale this year from Entergy to Exelon.
“It’s a bit of a learning (process),” Wilde said. “But the reality, especially when you’re talking multiple planned deals, is that you may adjust timing anyway.”
Accelerated Decommissioning Partners is looking to buy other nuclear power plants, though Wilde declined to discuss details: “As far as I’ll go there Is there are multiple discussions at various levels.”
The company’s business model is built on using the partners’ expertise – AREVA in nuclear parts disassembly and spent fuel operations and NorthStar in demolition and remediation – to cut costs and time in completing decommissioning of an atomic energy plant. That would be accomplished, in part, by moving quickly into cleanup once the facility closes, rather than spending money to sustain the site for up to several decades in SAFSTOR mode before starting active decommissioning.
The partners already have a test case for this novel approach: NorthStar’s plan to by the end of 2018 acquire the shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station from Entergy, with AREVA as a subcontractor for reactor components removal and transport. NorthStar says it could complete its work as early as 2026, decades earlier than Entergy had planned, with a projected $811 million price tag for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management.
At Vermont Yankee, NorthStar would take possession of the trust fund required of all nuclear power facilities to pay for decommissioning, and then keep a portion of what remains once its work is done. AREVA declined to say whether Accelerated Decommissioning Partners would do the same in its upcoming acquisitions.
Local attention to the Vermont Yankee deal has been intense: While the Vermont Public Utility Commission has final say in the state on the ownership transfer, a number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations have been authorized to intervene in the panel’s deliberations. They, and the public at large, have questioned NorthStar’s capacity to carry out the decommissioning as pledged and the means it would use – for example, whether rubble from demolition would be buried on site or trucked away.
NorthStar and AREVA have sent executives to public meetings in Vermont and used other outreach tools to help allay those concerns. “That’s what we try to get across to the community, is that we have the skills and ability and expertise to do what we say we’re going to do,” said Curtis Roberts, spokesman for AREVA Nuclear Materials, the U.S. branch of France’s newly reorganized New AREVA.
The back-and-forth, though, has at times been adversarial on both sides, with VT Digger reporting this week that Entergy and NorthStar have called on the PUC to dismiss testimony from two people connected to the New England Coalition, an anti-nuclear group and one of the interveners authorized by the commission.
“We and NorthStar knew that was going to be a very involved process,” Wilde said.
The discovery process for the sale is ongoing, with executives from Entergy and NorthStar, among others, giving depositions this month. Additional Vermont Public Utility Commission hearings are scheduled for January, and the companies hope for a state ruling on the sale by the second quarter of 2018. They are aiming for Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for transferring Vermont Yankee’s federal license to NorthStar by the end of the year, but the federal agency has not committed to that schedule.
Even when a nuclear facility is fully decommissioned, for now its owner is still stuck with responsibility for storage of spent fuel until the Department of Energy carries out its legal mandate to build a permanent repository for the material. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, DOE was supposed to start moving fuel in 1998 – that has not happened, and it remains to be seen whether after decades of debate the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada will advance toward fruition.
“We’re really in support of the most efficient solution for the industry, whether it’s going straight to a permanent repository, whether it’s going to consolidated interim storage, whether that’s one or two or more sites,” Wilde said.
Accelerated Decommissioning Partners has a good sense for how much it will cost to keep used fuel on-site at the nuclear plants it buys, he said, though it can’t discuss details.
If ADP’s business model proves successful, the partners’ peers in the nuclear industry are likely to try their hand at it, the AREVA managers said. Some close competitors have already indicated interest in entering the business, according to Wilde and Roberts. However, ADP has unique capabilities that “would be difficult to replicate,” Roberts added.
