AREVA Nuclear Materials said Tuesday it had signed a deal to extract and ship the reactor pressure vessel and internal reactor parts at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station for prospective plant owner NorthStar Group Services.
The New York-based decommissioning specialist hopes by the first quarter of next year to secure state and federal regulatory approval to buy the shuttered facility from power company Entergy for cleanup. It aims to complete decommissioning as early as 2026, decades before the schedule set by Entergy.
AREVA Nuclear Materials spokesman Curtis Roberts said Tuesday the fixed-price contract with NorthStar was signed about a month ago and that preliminary engineering for the project is already underway. Operations covered by the contract would not begin until ownership of the plant transfers to NorthStar.
AREVA expects by 2020 to complete segmenting, packaging, and transport of the reactor pressure vessel and reactor components. That would begin with dismantling the parts while they remain submerged in the pressure vessel, using remote-controlled gear, according to an AREVA press release. The items would be placed in shielded containers while still in the reactor pool; the containers would then be removed from the pool, decontaminated, placed in transport casks, and shipped to Waste Control Specialists’ storage facility in West Texas.
The reactor pressure vessel itself would subsequently be cut up into sizable pieces for packaging and transport to Texas.
Roberts declined to release additional details of the contract with NorthStar, including the dollar value.
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, but ADP hopes before the start of 2018 to buy two U.S. nuclear power plants.
An Entergy spokesman earlier this year identified those facilities as 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.
