VERNON – State officials have set a date for the first public hearing on the proposed sale of Vermont Yankee.
The Public Service Board’s hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. March 14 at Vernon Elementary School, 381 Governor Hunt Road in Vernon.
The hearing will be preceded at 6 p.m. by a public informational session on the plant sale. That meeting is organized by the state Public Service Department.
Vermont Yankee owner Entergy, which stopped power production at the nuclear plant in December 2014, announced plans late last year to sell the property to New York-based NorthStar Group Services.
NorthStar has pledged to complete decommissioning and site restoration on most of the property by the end of 2030. That’s decades earlier than Entergy had been planning.
The deal – in which NorthStar would retain ownership of the site after cleanup and would be responsible for long-term spent fuel management – is the first of its kind in the United States.
Entergy and NorthStar want to close the sale by the end of 2018. But approval from both the Public Service Board and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is needed for the transaction.
The companies filed an NRC application last month. The Public Service Board application was filed in December.
As part of the state’s review, the PSB is planning two public hearings in Vernon this year. The second is expected to happen in early September, just before the board holds technical hearings on the Vermont Yankee sale.
Geoff Commons, the Public Service Department’s acting public advocacy director, has said the board’s review schedule “recognizes the strong interest that the local community and region have in all matters related to the Vermont Yankee plant” and allows for “a serious, in-depth review” of the sale.
