[V]ERNON – Entergy will mark a Vermont Yankee milestone next week, but the occasion won’t be accompanied by any fanfare, public meetings or regulatory filings.
The company on Dec. 21 will make its final $5 million payment into the Vernon nuclear plant’s site restoration fund. With investment earnings factored in, the fund’s total at that point will surpass $30 million.
The fund is an “explicit and unique” source of cash for nonradiological cleanup at the idled plant, Entergy says. It’s also proof that Entergy is following through on a 2013 shutdown settlement with the state, said Mike Twomey, external affairs vice president.
“We’ve funded everything we said we would fund,” Twomey said. “We’ve paid everything we said we would pay.”
Entergy stopped power production at Vermont Yankee at the end of 2014. Prior to that, the company and Vermont officials crafted a settlement outlining Entergy’s continuing obligations in the region.
For example, the agreement earmarked half of the $5.2 million Entergy had paid into the state’s Clean Energy Development Fund for clean energy projects “in or for the benefit of Windham County.” Some of that cash is going toward high-efficiency wood heat projects, and some is funding a new grant program through the Windham Regional Commission.
Entergy also is paying $2 million annually for five years to support economic development in Windham County. Those payments – which support the Windham County Economic Development Program – are scheduled to end next year.
The site restoration fund is a lesser-known creation of the 2013 agreement. The deal called for “a separate trust fund specifically and solely dedicated” to nonradiological cleanup at the Vernon property.
Twomey, who was involved in settlement negotiations, said Entergy had been planning to pay for site restoration from the plant’s much larger decommissioning trust fund.
But talks with the state, which has jurisdiction over nonradiological contaminants, led to creation of a standalone fund that couldn’t be used for radiological work that is the purview of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“It is not typical,” Twomey said of the site restoration fund. “We certainly don’t have one set up anywhere else.”
In announcing the deal, state officials at the time said the site restoration trust would “ensure that separate funds are available if needed to return the site to a greenfield so that the site is available for reuse without restriction.”
Entergy committed to put an initial $10 million into the fund, with three additional $5 million contributions scheduled for the end of 2015, 2016 and 2017.
That $25 million total has been bolstered by $5.3 million in growth from investment income. Officials said the site restoration trust has benefited from the same strong market performance that has boosted Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning trust fund, which has seen nearly $50 million in market-related gains this year.
Entergy’s $25 million commitment to the site restoration fund was not tied to a specific cost estimate for that work. “It was just a number that we negotiated to create a fund of some substance,” Twomey said.
Separately, Entergy guaranteed the availability of an additional $20 million for site restoration if needed.
If the company gets state and federal permission to sell Vermont Yankee to the New York-based decommissioning company NorthStar Group Services, Entergy would be released from that guarantee, and all money in the site restoration trust fund would be transferred to NorthStar.
Unlike Entergy, NorthStar has proposed performing radiological decommissioning and nonradiological site restoration simultaneously. For that reason, NorthStar wants the Vermont Public Utility Commission’s permission to put the site restoration trust into a “segregated sub-account” within the decommissioning trust fund so both could be accessed at the same time.
That could fuel fears that the funds would be blended, nullifying the state’s previous efforts to create a separate site restoration account. But in testimony filed with the utility commission, NorthStar Chief Executive Officer Scott State pledged that his company would “allocate the cost of each task appropriately between radiological decommissioning and site restoration.”
NorthStar also offered to allow the state Public Service Department to review in advance any proposed disbursement from the site restoration fund and, if necessary, to object in writing.
