Another attempt by a nuclear watchdog to halt the sale of Three Mile Island “falls woefully short” of review guidelines set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company in charge of the plant’s decommissioning said in a new filing.
NRC should toss Three Mile Island Alert’s July 1 motion to reopen proceedings on the sale of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station’s Unit 2 reactor, EnergySolutions subsidiary TMI-2 Solutions said in a filing dated Monday.
The watchdog and its chair Eric Epstein didn’t “provide new evidence demonstrating a clear and material error by the Commission,” TMI-2 Solutions argued. The July 1 petition for reconsideration restated a previous argument that the Dauphin County, Pa. plant’s sale violated a water quality certification requirement under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. That argument, which NRC rejected in June, isn’t a good enough reason for the commission to reopen proceedings, TMI-2 Solutions said.
Under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, the watchdog argued July 1, TMI-2 Solutions would have needed to get permission to ignore certain water quality standards when it purchased Three Mile Island Unit 2 from FirstEnergy. The interstate Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which would be involved in such regulation, told RadWaste Monitor July 1 that after consulting with the NRC and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, it “did not learn of anything” that would require them to step in on the matter.
Monday’s filing also took issue with the timing of Epstein’s petition, which TMI-2 Solutions said came too late for NRC to accept. “[T]his is simply another attempt by TMIA to make an end run around the NRC’s rules of practice without any basis,” the decommissioning company said.
At deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor NRC had yet to respond to either filing.
Meanwhile, Epstein and his watchdog organization said they are preparing a legal challenge to Three Mile Island’s sale.
“I don’t really feel like I have an option,” Epstein told RadWaste Monitor via phone July 9. “When we went into this, the assumption was that [the water use allegations] would be rectified. I didn’t realize that I would walk into a wall of inertia.”
Epstein didn’t say when Three Mile Island Alert would file suit or whether the defendant would be NRC or a cadre of state agencies.
“My personal preference would have been to reluctantly accept the license transfer, and just have all the ‘I’s dotted and ‘T’s crossed. Reluctantly, we’re probably going to have to pursue this case,” Epstein said.
Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 reactor has been offline since 1974, when a partial core meltdown caused one of the worst radiological releases in U.S. history. EnergySolutions first announced it would buy the plant from FirstEnergy for decommissioning in 2019.
