In a short written notice, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it soon will grant a license amendment requested by plant owner Entergy to “reduce the scope of offsite and onsite emergency planning” at the Vernon plant.
Details of the NRC’s decision have not yet been released, but Entergy’s planned emergency preparation reductions have wide-reaching effects, including further staff cuts and the end of annual funding for towns within the plant’s emergency planning zone.
State officials had opposed the changes, but plant administrators see them as the next logical step in reducing operations – and costs – at Vermont Yankee, which was shut down at the end of 2014.
“It’s good news. We’re very encouraged,” Vermont Yankee spokesman Marty Cohn said. “We’re treating it as good news in keeping with our schedule as we had intended.”
The property is headed toward a decades-long period of dormancy called SAFSTOR prior to decommissioning. VY staff was cut from about 550 to about 300 in early 2015, after all nuclear fuel was removed from the plant’s reactor.
Another big staff reduction is planned in spring 2016. And that is directly connected to Entergy’s proposed license amendment for emergency planning, which includes elimination of an emergency operations facility and the plant’s joint information center.
There also would be external changes: Entergy asked the NRC for permission to shrink the Vermont Yankee emergency planning zone to the boundaries of the plant site itself. Currently, that 10-mile zone encompasses all or parts of six towns in Vermont, five in New Hampshire and seven in Massachusetts.
Shrinking the zone would mean the end of Entergy-supported sirens and batteries for radios. It also would mean the end of major, Vermont Yankee-related emergency funding for those states: In fiscal year 2015, Entergy gave $2.1 million to Vermont, $1.2 million to New Hampshire and just over $1 million to Massachusetts for emergency planning, with the states then sending money to each town in the emergency planning zone.
In anticipation of that money running out on June 30, 2016, New Hampshire struck a deal with Entergy for a greatly reduced emergency funding allocation – $279,000 over four years. Similar talks between Entergy and Vermont, however, have stalled.
Entergy has said its planned emergency changes are “commensurate with the reduction in hazards associated with the permanently defueled condition” – in other words, the reduced risk of a nuclear accident at a shutdown plant equals a reduced need for emergency planning.
But Vermont emergency officials objected, citing safety issues associated with the ongoing storage of spent nuclear fuel in a pool of water in the plant’s reactor building. Entergy plans to move all of the fuel into more-stable dry cask storage, but that is not scheduled to happen until the end of 2020.
The state Department of Health also has asked for Entergy funding for ongoing environmental monitoring and testing at and around the VY site.
Because the NRC’s final approval of Entergy’s license-amendment request is not yet available, agency spokesman Neil Sheehan could not comment on whether there will be any conditions imposed based on the state’s concerns and requests. But Sheehan acknowledged on Tuesday that the NRC’s advance notification “does signal to the parties involved with Vermont Yankee that we expect to approve the (emergency) changes.”
The Dec. 2 letter, a “notification of significant licensing action,” says NRC staff “proposes to make a final no significant hazards consideration determination and issue a related license amendment.” That will happen within the next few weeks, officials wrote.
