Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
8/22/2014
RGA Labs, the engineering company looking to purchase and restart Dominion’s Kewaunee Nuclear Power Station, sent a letter last week to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Region III office declaring its interest in potentially going through the unusual relicensing of a shutdown plant. The letter would indicate an increasing seriousness from the company into buying the plant for operations. The company believes it can harness value from the plant, which Dominion announced it would be closing back in 2012 due to a poor economic market for nuclear, even though it had recently been granted a 20-year license extension, by moving away from the traditional utility model of operation and turning toward a more long-term outlook approach.
A potential problem, though, is that the NRC has never re-licensed a plant that has entered shutdown. RGA President Robert Aboud hopes to solve that problem by meeting with the NRC. “It is clear that there is no existing pathway from SAFE-STORE to power operations,” Aboud said in the letter to the NRC. “However, it would seem to even the most casual of observers that if we have a license process that can go from beach sand to 100% power, we should be able to relicense a plant still some 95% complete, with a 39 year stellar operating record, virtually new steam generators, a recent uprate relicense, and a new 20 year operating license extension. It is our current opinion that what is needed is a short “on-ramp” to get from SAFE-STORE to entry points in 10CFR Parts 50, 51, & 52.We would like to meet with the Region III staff to discuss the issues associated with the potential to relicense Kewaunee and other reactors in similar circumstances and return to power operations. I very much appreciate the unusual nature of this request,” he wrote.
The NRC is reviewing the document, NRC Region III spokesperson Prema Chandrathil said. “We are reviewing the letter and will provide a response back to the company,” Chandrathil said. “The NRC has never encountered a proposal to restart a permanently shut down shut down and defueled nuclear power plant. If a sale from Dominion to the company was arranged any potential new company would have to show that they are capable of meeting NRC rules and regulations. If after the sale between both companies is possible and they are able to obtain an NRC license, the regulations lay out the path for a transferring a license as was the case when Dominion bought Kewaunee in 2004. If the new owner wanted to bring the reactor back into operation from its permanently shut down and defueled state, the company would have to provide the NRC with an application compatible with our regulations.”
For its part, Dominion said it still has not received any serious indication from RGA about talking about the proposal. When asked about RGA’s letter of interest, Dominion said it had not seen the letter, and was continuing its shutdown activities onsite as usual. There appears to be a large gap between the two parties concerning whether RGA has even reached out to the utility to signify its interest. According to Dominion spokesman Mark Katz, “They have not spoken to us, so they are kind of stirring things up locally, but they haven’t really had any dialogue with the company. We are continuing to move forward because in our minds, nothing has really changed, which is true. I’m never going to say never, but somebody has to talk though.”
