Editor’s note: This article is by Howard Weiss-Tisman, of the Brattleboro Reformer, in which it was first published July 24, 2015.
[B]RATTLEBORO — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has agreed to extend the licenses for the TransCanada Connecticut River dams by one year, largely due to the surprise closing of the Entergy Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
The licenses to operate the dams in Bellows Falls, Vernon and Wilder were set to expire on April 30, 2018, and TransCanada is currently in the middle of a five-year re-licensing process.
Entergy’s announcement in August 2013 that it would close the Vernon reactor at the end of 2014 meant that any aquatic studies required through the re-licensing process would have to be redone due to the dramatic changes in river temperature caused by the closing of the reactor.
Vermont Yankee used Connecticut River water to cool down the plant’s reactor water, and the water returned to the river was several degrees warmer than the river’s base temperature.
TransCanada and the Connecticut River Watershed Council both argued that additional studies on the river would be needed for the re-licensing process following the plant’s closing on Dec. 29, 2014, and FERC this week agreed to extend the licenses by a year, effectively extending the re-licensing by one year.
“The problem was that not only is the process time frame tight to start with but with VY’s surprise announcement about their closing it put some of the fisheries studies a year behind,” said Connecticut River Watershed Council Upper Valley River Steward David Deen. “The extension of the licenses of the three facilities was the only way FERC could give us more time. FERC couldn’t just say, ‘OK folks, we’re going to slow this down.’ They had to extend the licenses.”
TransCanada did not respond to requests for a comment.
“The decommissioning of Vermont Yankee created a unique situation where it was necessary to delay a significant number of studies to ensure that valid data would be collected,” FERC Division of Hydropower Administration and Compliance Director Jennifer Hill wrote in the order. “Extending the license terms of TransCanada’s projects would remedy many conflicts with the commission’s integrated licensing regulations caused by decommissioning Vermont Yankee.”
TransCanada asked FERC for the extension in January 2015 and Connecticut River Watershed Council supported the request. The company is in the pre-filing phase and the formal application is due Jan. 1, 2016.
Under the previous schedule the Connecticut River Watershed Council, other nonprofit groups watching the proceedings, as well as state and federal agencies, would have had to evaluate up to 33 reports from two years of field work between Sept. 4 and Nov. 14, 2015. The one year extension allows scientists to make sure the data they are collecting from the river is accurate in a post-VY environment.
“The world of the river changes once they stop adding heat so if the studies had started as planned it would have been doing the field work to establish a baseline with the hot water being pumped into the river and then the next year the hot water was not there anymore,” Deen said. “There was just not enough time for anybody to get it right.”
FERC this week extended the licenses for the three Connecticut River dams but did not rule on the Turner Falls Dam or on the Northfield Mountain Pump Storage Station, whose licenses are also both set to expire 2018. FERC was trying to keep all five re-licensing proceedings on the same time line, but Deen said it was unclear if the two Massachusetts facilities would also have their licenses extended.
