Delaying the partial release of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station by four years will not increase the cost of decommissioning the shuttered plant, a representative of Holtec International said this week.
Holtec in October disclosed that Pilgrim’s partial release date will slip to Sept. 24, 2035 from Sept. 24, 2031. The company, which bought the plant from Entergy in 2019, blamed a recent state decision prohibiting discharge of irradiated water from the decommissioning into Cape Cod bay.
For now, “our initial assessment is that it [the delay] does not negatively impact the financials,” Dave Noyes, Holtec’s compliance manager for Pilgrim, told the Massachusetts Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel on Monday. The meeting was webcast and recorded.
Noyes said that irradiated water from Pilgrim’s reactor vessel will be drained into the reactor torus, a doughnut-shaped water well below the vessel, sometime after “the first quarter of next year.”
Holtec will reassess the effects of the delay on Pilgrim’s decommissioning trust fund by March 31, said Noyes, but because the company will not have to employ every demolition contractor on the payroll now while water sits in the torus, costs are unlikely to climb.
Holtec cannot carve up the reactor vessel and ship it off to Waste Control Specialists’ disposal site in Andrews, Texas, until the water is out of the torus.
While the water sits there, Holtec could find itself in a long legal fight with Massachusetts.
In July, Massachusetts’ Department of Environmental Protection tentatively ruled that discharging irradiated wastewater from Pilgrim violated the state’s Ocean Sanctuaries Act.
The state had not finalized that decision as of Monday, but if it does, “I would fully expect, given the commitment of Holtec to do what it believes to do with disposition of the water that we will move forward with appeal and adjudication processes,” Noyes said.
One panel member accused Holtec of effectively punishing Pilgrim’s host town of Plymouth, Mass., by refusing to truck the irradiated water out of state for disposal.
“You’re imposing a penalty on the town of Plymouth directly by delaying the release of the property because you don’t like the permit decision,” Andrew Gottleib, executive director of the Association to Protect Cape Cod, told Noyes on Monday.
The four-year delay Holtec wrote into Pilgrim’s decommissioning schedule “could well be seen as a positioning and a negotiating tactic,” said Gottleib, who was appointed to the panel in 2022 by then-Massachusetts-Gov. Charlie Baker (R).
Another panel member, Mary Lampert, told Noyes that Holtec should just pack the Pilgrim wastewater up for shipping and “add a few more trucks” to the ones the company is already sending to Waste Control Specialists.
John Priest, director of the Radiation Control Program for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, asked Noyes whether it would “be cheaper to adjudicate a decision that’s not in their [Holtec’s] favor” rather than truck the water off site, as NorthStar has done during the ongoing decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vernon, Vt.
Noyes did not answer the question but said that Holtec would dispose of the irradiated water safely.
