Nuclear services firm EnergySolutions on Tuesday announced its first foray into the burgeoning business for acquiring retired nuclear power plants for decommissioning.
The Salt Lake City-based company said it had inked a term sheet with a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. for the asset transfer of reactor Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pa. Upon finalizing the deal, EnergySolutions would own the reactor plant, along with all responsibility for decommissioning and presumably its decommissioning trust fund.
Next steps will be signing final agreements and filing a license transfer application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. EnergySolutions and FirstEnergy on Tuesday did not release details of the schedule for that process. The prospective plant owner also did not discuss its projected schedule for decommissioning Unit 2, which it would conduct in partnership with New Jersey construction company Jingoli.
EnergySolutions has managed a number of nuclear decommissioning projects, including the Zion power plant in Illinois and the La Crosse facility in Wisconsin. But it has never owned the facility on which it was working.
That is the business model taken up in recent years by two corporate teams: Holtec International and Accelerated Decommissioning Partners, a joint venture of Orano and NorthStar Group Services.
“We are looking forward to working with FirstEnergy to acquire the asset and to safely complete the decommissioning of the site,” EnergySolutions President and CEO Ken Robuck said a press release. “Our extensive experience allows us to continue to refine our Decommissioning Management Model, which builds on each project by incorporating lessons learned and utilizing leading technologies that have been proven successful.”
Three Mile Island Unit 2 operated for only four months before its infamous March 1979 partial meltdown. It never operated again and is now in safe-storage mode, with its used fuel shipped to the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory for storage.
Under the current FirstEnergy Corp. schedule, reactor dismantlement would start in 2041 and wrap up in 2054, company spokeswoman Jennifer Young said by email Tuesday.
Reactor Unit 1 at Three Mile Island is owned by Exelon and is scheduled to close by Sept. 30.
