The Massachusetts legislature stripped a proposal to create a radioactive wastewater commission from the final version of the state budget sent to the governor this week.
Lawmakers sent a compromise version of the state’s $56-billion budget proposal to Gov. Maura Healey (D) on Monday after a six-person conference committee of the state’s bicameral legislature hammered out the package on Sunday. Healey had not signed the bill as of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
The conference committee removed from the budget a proposal Sen. Susan Moran (D-Plymouth/Barnstable) to create a commission to study the discharge of radioactive water into state waters.
The proposal, which would effectively have blocked discharges into Cape Cod Bay from the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. It was yanked from the budget a week after the Healey administration did essentially the same thing.
On July 24, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection ruled that Holtec International, the Jupiter, Fla.-based company decommissioning the shuttered Pilgrim plant, would violate the state’s Ocean Sanctuaries Act if it discharged any irradiated water into Cape Cod Bay.
The Healey administration said that the water Holtec wants to dump into the bay does not qualify for any of the exemptions in the state act because Pilgrim is no longer generating electricity and because some of the irradiated water was created during decommissioning.
