A senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission official last week said the agency officials aim to participate in a public meeting on the planned sale of the shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
Vermont Yankee closed in December 2014. Owner Entergy now hopes to sell the facility and its decommissioning trust fund to NorthStar Group Services to dismantle the plant and clean up the site.
Marc Dapas, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, responded on April 4 to a Feb. 1 letter from the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel (NDCAP). In the letter, the state panel requested that the regulator convene a meeting on the sale and license transfer, as well as the updated post-shutdown decommissioning activities report and site-specific decommissioning cost estimate due at some point from NorthStar.
“While the NRC’s regulations do not require the NRC to hold a public meeting in response to the submittal of the license transfer request and documents described above, I agree that the citizens of Vermont and the neighboring states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire should have the opportunity to engage directly with representatives of the NRC on these topics,” Dapas wrote to NDCAP Chair Kate O’Connor.
Dapas indicated the agency would send officials to a meeting convened by NDCAP.
Meanwhile, local residents expressed cautious optimism about the sale during a meeting Thursday in the town of Vernon of the state Public Service Board, the Rutland Herald reported. NorthStar hopes to finish decommissioning Vermont Yankee by 2030, decades earlier than the schedule previously set by Entergy. While the revised schedule drew plaudits from speakers at the meeting, they also wondered whether NorthStar could pull it off.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” the newspaper quoted Vernon Planning Commission Chairman Robert Spencer as saying.
Separately, the NRC is also evaluating a plan for truck transport of 200,000 gallons of low-level radioactive waste water from Vermont Yankee to a US Ecology facility in southwest Idaho, The Associated Press reported Friday.
