[B]RATTLEBORO – Entergy has spent about $6 million to deal with an ongoing water-intrusion problem at Vermont Yankee, administrators said Thursday.
More than half of that amount – about $3.5 million – has gone to a disposal company that’s hauling the tainted water out of state. The total also includes nearly $2 million that Entergy has invested to slow the rate of groundwater leaching into the Vernon nuclear plant’s turbine building.
That work has paid off: The water-intrusion rate has dropped to 300 gallons a day, said Joe Lynch, a senior government affairs manager for Entergy.
“We reported numbers as high as 3,000 gallons a day several years ago,” Lynch said. “So we’ve seen quite a considerable reduction with the work that we’ve done.”
Entergy administrators began noticing large amounts of groundwater entering the lower level of the turbine building after Vermont Yankee stopped producing power at the end of 2014. The plant’s shutdown exacerbated the problem, since heat from operations previously had evaporated some of the water.
The groundwater is clean before it enters the building, officials have said, but it picks up low amounts of radioactivity by coming into contact with the structure. So the water is considered contaminated and cannot be discharged on site.
The issue first became public in early 2016 in a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection report. A VTDigger investigation found that administrators had resorted to using kiddie swimming pools to temporarily store water.
That was a short-term fix: Entergy soon contracted with Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions to begin disposing of the water. Since then, tanker trucks carrying about 5,000 gallons each have been regularly leaving Vernon for EnergySolutions’ disposal facility in Tennessee.
So far, Entergy has shipped 782,000 gallons of water. The next shipment is scheduled for July 9, Lynch told the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel at a meeting Thursday night in Brattleboro.
Lynch also disclosed that the water issue has cost Entergy $6 million so far.
“Out of that, $3.5 million is the actual disposal cost that was paid to EnergySolutions in Tennessee,” Lynch said in an interview. “They provide the trucks and the transportation.”
Another $600,000 or so has gone toward water-related costs like collection and testing, Lynch said.
Entergy also has spent about $1.9 million on efforts to better seal the turbine building. That figure includes costs for outside consultants and studies, Lynch said.
While seasonal changes account for some of the fluctuations in water-intrusion rates, Lynch said Entergy’s work on the turbine building is making a difference. The intrusion rate was estimated at 500 to 700 gallons per day in late May, meaning the rate has been cut in half in about a month’s time.
Lynch said Entergy is “continuing to look at other opportunities” to better seal the building. But not every leak is worth fixing.
“Really, what it comes down to is a cost-benefit analysis,” Lynch said. “If we measure an area that’s contributing 10 gallons per day but it costs $100,000 to fix it, we’ll do a quick evaluation to see whether it’s worthy of spending the money to do it.”
That’s one reason the water issue probably isn’t going away. Lynch said it’s “very unlikely that we would get it down to zero.”
So, whether Entergy retains ownership of the plant or is granted permission to sell it to NorthStar Group Services for decommissioning, “water management will be something that we’re going to have to address going forward,” Lynch said.
The hope, however, is that intrusion rates will stay low in order to reduce expenses. At the current rate, “we would only be shipping once every two weeks … which is pretty good,” Lynch said.
Entergy has drawn money from Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning trust fund to cover all of its water-related costs. Administrators have said they budgeted for water issues, though they’ve acknowledged that the intrusion happened at a rate greater than they had expected.
“The decommissioning cost estimate has an element in it for the management of water,” Lynch said. “It was recognized that we would be managing water.”
The plant’s decommissioning trust fund stood at $555.7 million as of May 31, Entergy reported Thursday. The company has spent $17.8 million from the fund this year.
Barring any major withdrawals this year, the fund appears to be on track to meet a requirement built into Entergy’s proposed sale agreement with NorthStar. There must be a combined $538 million in Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning trust fund and a separate site-restoration trust fund when the sale closes.
The site restoration trust balance is $31.6 million. So if the sale were to close today, the decommissioning trust fund would require a minimum balance of roughly $506.4 million.
Estimates for decommissioning the plant over a decades long process originally topped $1.24 billion. NorthStar has said it can expedite the process and save money. Total costs for managing the decommissioning process, the company says, would be about $511 million. Managing long-term spent fuel at the site adds another $300 million to the pricetag for a total of $811 million through 2052, according to a filing with the Vermont Public Utility Commission.
Despite delays in the regulatory process, Entergy and NorthStar executives say they’re still hoping to finalize the Vermont Yankee sale by the end of this year if they receive the necessary state and federal approvals.
