Critics of Entergy’s plan to decommission Vermont Yankee say it should do more to address human health and environmental concerns, but the company contends its plan complies with federal regulations.
The Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance, an anti-nuclear group, filed public comments with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month raising concerns about Entergy’s plan to decommission Vermont Yankee. The nuclear power plant in Vernon permanently shut down Dec. 29 for economic reasons, the company says.
Entergy says many of the requests by advocates and the state would increase the cost and timeline to decommission the plant.
VYDA says Entergy should keep in place its 10-mile-radius emergency planning zone until 2020. The NRC gave preliminary approval to Entergy’s request to eliminate off-site emergency planning in March. The company says there is no off-site risk after April 2016 and keeping the plan in place would cost $120 million over five years.
The group is asking that Entergy only transfer spent fuel rods from a cooling pool into dry cask when a neighboring school is not in session in order to protect the children’s safety.
Entergy says it has already loaded casks without accident and it plans to load 45 casks in 45 weeks beginning in 2019 without further delay and costs.
The group says the plan should consider possible effects of climate change on the Connecticut River, including the possibility a flood could plug the casks’ cooling vents with sediment. They also question current flood-plain maps.
Entergy says the dry cask storage pad is in a 1,000-year flood plain 254-feet above sea level. By 2020, the company hopes to have all 3,880 spent fuel assemblies placed into 58 dry cask storage units along the west shore of the river, where it will remain until the federal government takes the fuel.
In order to reduce the cost of decommissioning, the group wants the company to begin tearing down the Advanced Off Gas (AOG) building as soon as possible since the contaminants tritium and strontium-90 were detected in sampling wells at the site.
Entergy says it will begin decommissioning 120 days after it has enough money in a trust fund to complete the entire process process, which is estimated at $1.24 billion. Entergy has about $665 million in the fund.
The group says the company should not be able to use the decommissioning trust fund for spent fuel management — which requires permission from the NRC — because it will delay the timeline. Entergy says it will use two CitiBank loans totaling $145 million to cover part of the anticipated total of $368 million needed to move the spent fuel.
The alliance’s comments will be used in the NRC’s review of Entergy’s Post Shutdown Activities Report, which was submitted to the NRC on Dec. 19, 2014. The deadline for submitting comments was March 23.
The state of Vermont has also commented on the PSDAR and said it has concerns about the cost and how to pay for decommissioning and whether Entergy’s plan protects public health and the environment.
