The company in charge of decommissioning a shuttered New York nuclear power plant has finished packing spent fuel from one of the facility’s three reactors into storage canisters, a senior official said last week.
Holtec International wrapped up fuel loading operations at Indian Point Energy Center’s Unit 2 reactor Feb. 1, site vice president Rich Burroni said in an op-ed published Feb. 16 in the local River Journal newspaper.
The loading process, which involved moving the reactor’s 896 fuel assemblies into 28 storage casks from the plant’s spent fuel pool, was finished three weeks earlier than scheduled, Burroni said. The whole campaign took around seven months to complete — Holtec began work back in August.
“While this milestone is one that we celebrate, we know the job ahead of us remains a long-term one,” Burroni wrote. Holtec still has to load spent fuel from the Buchanan, N.Y., Indian Point plant’s Unit 3 reactor, work that Burroni predicted will begin in May. The Unit 3 reactor has around 1,300 additional spent fuel assemblies — all told, the plant’s total waste inventory will occupy 127 spent fuel storage canisters.
After fuel loading operations are complete, Holtec “will continue to work to decommission the site and allow for eventual repurposing of the site,” Burroni said. The company, which is angling to be one of the first to develop advanced nuclear technologies, has floated using its nuclear decommissioning sites to host small modular reactors.
Camden, N.J.-based Holtec took ownership of the Indian Point plant after its Unit 2 and 3 reactors shut down in April 2021. Indian Point’s Unit 1 reactor went offline in 1974.
Holtec has said it could finish decommissioning the facility by 2027.
