Indian Point closing will end Entergy era in Northeast

VERNON, Vt. — The announcement this week that Entergy Nuclear would close its 2,000-megawatt Indian Point nuclear power station north of New York City by 2021 will effectively end the Entergy era in the Northeast, as the Louisiana-based power company washes its hands of six nuclear reactors far from its home base in the South.

The Indian Point announcement is the last piece of Entergy’s divestment of merchant nuclear plants in the Northeast — power plants that generate electricity that is sold on the open market and not with the benefit of long-term contracts with ratepayers at guaranteed prices.

With the new administration of Vermont Gov. Phil Scott still settling in, the new commissioner of the state Department of Public Service, June Tierney, declined to be interviewed.

Geoff Commons, director of advocacy for the department, said the Scott administration would have no response on the Yankee and Indian Point situation at this time.

But the chairwoman of the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, Kate O’Connor, said she saw no direct connection between the Indian Point decision and Vermont Yankee’s pending decommissioning.

In fact, O’Connor said, there might be a hidden benefit with an added incentive for Northstar to do a good job at Vermont Yankee.

Entergy announced in November that it had struck a deal with NorthStar, an industrial demolition company from New York City, which has plans to form partnerships with other international companies and take on the demolition and cleanup of the Vernon reactor roughly 40 years earlier than Entergy’s timetable.

O’Connor said that the two Entergy plants’ decommissioning trust funds were independent of each other, following Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards.

But NorthStar undoubtedly will want to do a good job with Vermont Yankee, and perhaps continue the decommissioning of the other Entergy Northeast reactors, including the Pilgrim plant south of Boston, Palisades in Michigan and now Indian Point.

Entergy had earlier announced it was shutting down its FitzPatrick plant in upstate New York, but it has since sold the plant to Exelon after New York State adopted new power rate incentives that benefit FitzPatrick.

Jerry Nappi, Entergy Nuclear spokesman for Indian Point, said there was no direct connection between Yankee’s pending decommissioning and Indian Point’s announced shutdown.

“Indian Point is the last merchant plant owned by Entergy,” Nappi said. He said the causes behind the two plants closing were the same: low power prices caused by fracked natural gas.

As a result, he said, it was difficult for a nuclear power station to operate successfully as a merchant plant.

Indian Point is gigantic in terms of power generation, compared to Vermont Yankee. It provides 2,000 megawatts of power to the New York City and Westchester County region, one quarter of the metropolitan region’s power needs. About 1,000 people work at Indian Point.

Entergy officials, as they had when they announced in 2013 they would close Vermont Yankee in 2014, cited depressed power rates attributed to cheap fracked natural gas.