Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., broke Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules between 2021 and 2023 by using money from the Palisades Nuclear Plant’s decommissioning trust fund for expenses unrelated to decommissioning the plant, the commission said last week.
Holtec spent $57,000 from the fund on “restart activities” and “community events/support activities,” according to an NRC inspection report published online Feb. 21. Most of the money, $53,500, was for the restart activities. Holtec is trying to power Palisades back up. The plant shut down in 2022. Holtec has said it has done no significant decommissioning at the plant.
Holtec “arranged for replacement” of the funds that were inappropriately withdrawn from the trust, according to NRC’s report. The company told the commission that people at the plant had used the wrong billing codes to pay for both restart activities and contributions to the community, according to the report. The Palisades decommissioning trust had $547 million in it as of Dec. 31, 2022, according to a March 31, 2023 report from Holtec that included the most recent public disclosure about the fund available as of Friday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week said it amended GE-Hitachi’s license for the Nuclear Test Reactor at the Vallecitos Nuclear Center in Sunol, Calif., to transition the facility into decommissioning.
In a letter dated Wednesday, the NRC said it amended GE-Hitachi’s license to prohibit operation of the reactor, a standard step in the decommissioning process. NorthStar Group Services will eventually decommission the entire Vallecitos complex, under a deal inked in May.
NorthStar in November announced it had removed one of the four Vallecitos reactors from the site, which is about 15 miles by road from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Earnings in BWX Technologies’ commercial nuclear segment rose in 2023 and in the final quarter of that year, the Lynchburg, Va., company reported this week.
In the Commercial Operations segment, operating income for 2023 was $37.5 million, up about 37% from about $27.4 million a year ago, the company wrote in its latest earnings release. Segment revenue for the year was about $466.3 million, up around 9% compared with roughly $427.4 million last year.
Quarterly segment operating income for Commercial Operations was roughly $15.9 million, more than quadruple the roughly $3.7 million from a year ago. Quarterly segment revenue was about $124.1 million, up roughly 16% compared with $107.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
A single “immature green sea turtle” was removed from a water intake structure at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on Dec. 11 and “transferred unharmed” to the Marine Mammal Center Morro Bay, the nearest authorized rescue center, according to a letter to an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from the plant’s manager.
It was the only sea turtle observed in the plant’s vicinity in all of 2023, according to the letter, which is dated Jan. 25 and was posted online by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week. Following a “biological opinion” released in 2006 by NRC and NOAA staff, certain nuclear power plants issue annual sea-turtle reports to NOAA.
