NorthStar Group Services is filling out its team for decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, even as it faces continued questions about its capacity to carry off the project.

The New York City-based decommissioning specialist hopes by the first quarter of 2018 to secure state and federal regulatory approval to acquire the plant that shut down in 2014. The company and current facility owner Entergy want to seal the deal by the end of next year, after which NorthStar says it can complete decommissioning as early as 2026.

Toward that end, AREVA Nuclear Materials said Tuesday it had signed a deal to extract and ship the reactor pressure vessel and internal reactor parts at Vermont Yankee for NorthStar. The fixed-price contract was signed about a month ago, and engineering and other preparatory activities for the project are underway, AREVA Nuclear Materials President and CEO Sam Shakir told RadWaste Monitor on Thursday.

“Once the transaction closes with NorthStar we will be ready to deploy,” said Shakir, who noted the company’s experience doing similar projects in about 10 reactors in the United States and Germany.

AREVA Nuclear Materials will begin its work with reactor segmentation and expects by 2020 to complete segmenting, packaging, and transport of the reactor pressure vessel and reactor components. Much of the work at the plant will be done underwater via remote-controlled equipment, and all parts would be shipped to Waste Control Specialists’ radioactive waste storage facility in West Texas.

Further details regarding the contract, including the dollar value, were not released.

The timing for state and federal approval of the Vermont Yankee sale remains in question. NorthStar has said it wants the NRC to authorize transfer of the plant license by the end of 2017, with the Vermont Public Utility Commission (until recently called the state Public Service Board) signing off in the first quarter of 2018.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said this week that “unique elements” in the application leave it unclear whether the regulator can meet the schedule request.

“[T]his would be the first time a company is seeking to purchase a permanently shutdown nuclear power plant for the purpose of decommissioning it,” he said by email. “There have been two decommissioned plants (Zion and LaCrosse) where the licenses have been temporarily transferred to another company so that it can carry out the decontamination and dismantlement work, with a plan to transfer it back once the work is completed. But in the case of Vermont Yankee, the license transfer, if approved, would be permanent.”

NorthStar would buy the power plant for a nominal $1,000, but would keep a portion of whatever decommissioning trust fund money remains after the work is complete.

The company’s expedited decommissioning plan, pledging to complete work by 2030 rather than the roughly 50-year timeline under Entergy’s prior schedule, raises questions about funding the work, Sheehan said. The prospective plant owner estimates decommissioning will cost $811.5 million, plus $30.6 million in pre-closing expenses, a steep drop from Entergy’s $1.24 billion estimate from 2014. However, cutting decades off the cleanup timeline is decades fewer for the decommissioning trust fund to grow – it held nearly $572 million as of March.

The state of Vermont raised that concern last month in its request to intervene and for a hearing in the NRC review of the license transfer application. The state filing cites a number of scenarios in which the trust fund could be depleted before decommissioning is completed, including delays in operations that increase overhead and project management costs and discovery of previously unidentified radiological contamination.

The nongovernmental New England Coalition on June 27 became the second entity to request intervention in the license transfer with the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The organization also expressed concerns over whether there is enough money to wrap up decommissioning.

“NorthStar has not performed a Vermont Yankee radiological site survey adequate to determine realistic soil and concrete remediation cost estimates, without which it cannot know how much money and resources will actually be required over time and thus it cannot reasonably assure that it has adequate financial resources to own and operate Vermont Yankee for the purpose of decommissioning and fuel storage,” the New England Coalition said.

The application to the NRC must also be rejected because it does not include an adequate environmental report or environmental impact statement, the group said.

NorthStar did not respond to a request for comment regarding the assertions from Vermont and the New England Coalition. However, Shakir said he confident in the company’s ability to meet its targets.

“We have worked very closely with NorthStar on the decommissioning cost estimate, both at Vermont Yankee as well as other sites. We have independently verified the schedules and the figures, basing it on our experience, and feel very comfortable that the project can be executed with the skills that both companies have and the time frame that’s been defined, and with the funding that’s available,” he said.

The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board generally requires several months to issue rulings on requests for hearings, most often after hearing oral arguments on the matter, Sheehan said.

AREVA Nuclear Materials, the U.S. branch of French nuclear giant AREVA, in February announced it would partner with NorthStar to form Accelerated Decommissioning Partners (ADP) to acquire and decommission shuttered nuclear plants. The Vermont Yankee contract is not part of that partnership, as NorthStar had announced the deal with Entergy prior to ADP’s formation, Shakir said.

Future opportunities for NorthStar and AREVA Nuclear Materials will be managed through the joint venture, Shakir added. He confirmed reports that Accelerated Decommissioning Partners hopes before the start of 2018 to buy two more Entergy nuclear power plants for decommissioning: the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts, which is scheduled to close in 2019, and the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan, scheduled for shutdown in 2018.