A local planning group for communities that host nuclear plants is expressing concern about the planned sale of Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to a demolition and abatement business — an arrangement it predicts “will become standard for the industry.”
So far the standard procedure has been for operators of nuclear reactors to decommision the plants themselves, but the Institute for Nuclear Host Communities executive and program directors, in a letter this week to the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, called the proposed Vermont Yankee sale to NorthStar Group Services of New York as “a bit more complicated than it might appear at first glance.”
The institute is a planning group that grew out of the University of Massachusetts Center for Economic Development and its work around the economic effects of nuclear plant decommissioning on communities like those around the former Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe.
INHC Executive Director Jeffrey M. Lewis and Program Director Jennifer Stromsten, who also sent their letter to Vermont Public Service Commissioner Chris Recchia, “strongly encouraged” the state Public Service Department and Public Service Board to hire “qualified engineering talent with extensive experience in performance-based contracts.”
The Vermont Public Service Board, like the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, needs to formally approve the deal, and the state board must also set site restoration standards, which are specific criteria by which the Vernon, Vt., reactor site will be left by NorthStar and its partner companies after decommissioning.
INHC also points out that the agreement for selling Vermont Yankee to NorthStar to dismantle the plant that was shut down two years ago and decommission it by 2030 “looks a lot more like an insurance contract than a performance contract” because a nearly $600 million Nuclear Decommissioning Fund would be transferred to NorthStar for it to assume the risk of dismantling and removing the reactor, rather than for receiving a physical asset.
They urge Vermont’s Department of Financial Regulation to oversee the process and possibly provide oversight to ensure “that enough money is in the deal to complete the deal.” That’s needed they warn, because “the incentives to the buyer are perverse — they are motivated to do less to increase profit.”
The planned sale would expedite the reactor’s decommissioning, which Entergy had originally announced would not be completed before 2075, so that it would begin before 2022 and be complete by 2031. It would make use of a unique “guaranteed fixed payment system” by which NorthStar would be obligated to perform each component of cleanup and restoration using fixed payments for each of over 900 discrete project elements, NorthStar’s CEO told the advisory panel last week.
The Institute, which describes itself as neither pro- or anti-nuclear, noted in its letter that the Site Restoration Standard to guide how the property is left after decommissioning has not yet been set.
The standard would be set by state agencies, with input from the Town of Vernon, as part of the Public Service Board’s Certificate of Public Good on which the sale is depends. Entergy plans to apply for that approval as well as NRC approval by the end of this month, asking that they be granted by the end of 2018.
Thus far, the letter noted, there’s been no public planning process for reuse of the site, where high-level waste storage casks would be left in place until the federal Department of Energy agrees to remove them, which at best could be decades away.
Lack of a site restoration standard determined by a “robust site reuse planning process,” Lewis and Stromsten add, is an uncertainty that “creates political risk for both Entergy and the state.”
And the likelihood that the proposed sale will be the first of many decommissionings of commercial nuclear reactors “bears the extra responsibility and opportunity of setting precedent” for many communities around the country, the watchdog group said.