[V]ERNON — Josh Unruh, the town selectboard chair, sat in a metal folding chair under a pop-up blue tent Thursday afternoon, looking across a field as two giant excavators tore down Vermont Yankee’s eastern cooling tower.
“It’s definitely bittersweet to see the end of an era, the end of what was the identity of Vernon for many years,” he said.
The cooling towers, built in the early 1970s of rot-resistant Douglas fir and redwood, were notably not the giant parabolic concrete towers often associated with nuclear power plants. Each of the plant’s two towers — 42 feet tall and 462 feet long — contains 11 individual cells, sided with fiberglass louvers.
NorthStar, the new owner of Vermont Yankee, had set up two tents and chairs for a cooling tower takedown viewing. A giant 365CL Caterpillar was grabbing chunks of the tower — wooden beams, cement boards, a huge blue flower-like fan — from the north side, throwing them to the ground. A smaller but still formidable excavator was attacking the tower from its elongated west side. A remotely operated industrial sprayer shot water on the working area to mitigate dust.
The larger excavator eventually grabbed a piece of a 6-foot-wide pipe to use as a battering ram, resulting in more dramatic collapses of the tower. It’s going to take at least another day for that tower to come down, and the NorthStar crew will tear down the next one in a week or two.
The tower remnants will be trucked off-site to the Minerva landfill in Ohio, while radioactive waste will be moved out by train to a special facility in Texas.
Until its closure five years ago, the plant’s reactor core heated water to the point of boiling, sending steam to turbines to generate electricity. The towers served to cool water coming from the condenser before going back into the Connecticut River, though that was only required during the warmer months.
The original plan for Vermont Yankee’s dismantling called for several decades of dormancy before cleanup work began in earnest. But former owner Entergy last year received the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s permission and state Public Utility Commission approval to transfer the plant’s nuclear license and ownership to New York-based NorthStar.
NorthStar, an industrial demolition company, wasted no time getting started on decommissioning the plant upon acquiring the site in January. Scott State, NorthStar CEO, said during a site tour Thursday that the company was decommissioning the plant from the outside in — and may have the site cleaned up as soon as 2026.
Entergy transferred the spent fuel last year to fuel casks, which have to be stored on-site until the federal Department of Energy figures out a long-term storage site for them. State said NorthStar has now cleaned out the spent fuel pools.
A major early component of the decommissioning project is cutting up and removing the plant’s reactor vessel. NorthStar contracted with Orano USA, an offshoot of a French nuclear cleanup company, to do most of that work. State said Orano has around 30 French and U.S. employees on-site, who have already started taking apart the reactor head.
“That work is being done interior to the reactor building,” he said of Orano’s work. “Then what’s left will be the reactor building while we’re doing exterior work — kind of collapsing the whole site into (that) building.”
NorthStar has also rebuilt the rail spur to the plant to be able to haul out waste, demolished an old construction building and set up a massive tent-like staging area to load materials onto customized rail cars. Any radioactive waste gets encased in concrete before it’s moved off-site, State said.
While the cooling towers are some of the most iconic parts of Vermont Yankee, they are not one of the radioactive parts of the site. “Basically, it’s a building demolition project,” Gerold Noyes, hazardous site manager for the state Agency of Natural Resources, said of the cooling towers in a phone interview Thursday.
Vermont Yankee is the first full-scale nuclear power plant that NorthStar had decommissioned. However, State, a nuclear engineer who took over the helm of NorthStar 10 years ago, said the company has worked on “dozens of nuclear projects,” such as dismantling research reactors.
“It’s nothing really new to us,” he said. “But the actual way we proposed to do this where we would take ownership of the facility and then decommission it as the owner was the first time it had been done in the U.S.”
Neil Sheehan, public affairs officer for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the NRC is seeing more applications for “immediate dismantlement” à la Vermont Yankee. NorthStar has a similar project in the works at the Crystal River power plant in Florida. And New Jersey-based Holtec recently acquired the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey for decommissioning, said Sheehan.
The NRC’s job is to make sure the radiological waste is properly cleaned up, while state regulators oversee the non-radioactive site remediation. Sheehan said NRC had ramped up inspections of the site since decommissioning began, with the last inspection occurring in mid-June.
“Our observations to date have been that the decommissioning activities at Vermont Yankee have been conducted safely,” he said.
Noyes of ANR said the state had hired an environmental consultant to verify asbestos inspections NorthStar had to conduct. The company had to complete asbestos remediation in the cooling towers before they could be dismantled, he said.
And a NorthStar consultant was in the process of doing more general site inspections to determine where non-radioactive environmental hazards might exist, he said.
“You have to remember this was an industrial site since the late 1960s,” Noyes added, saying the former plant owners used to have a dry cleaning operation on-site.
Vermont Yankee, which operated for 42 years, used to employ hundreds of people and once produced three-quarters of the electricity generated in state. But the plant’s operation was not without controversy. In 2007, a partial collapse of one of the cooling towers revived calls from environmentalists to shutter the plant. A tritium leak at Vermont Yankee and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 contributed to large protests against the plant.
Former plant owner Entergy stopped producing power at the plant in 2014, citing economic reasons like the low price of natural gas.
Selectboard Chair Unruh said many of those who had worked at the plant had since headed to South Carolina for specialized jobs at other nuclear sites. Others stuck around and have started small businesses in the area. And 30 or 40 are now working for NorthStar to wind things down.
“It’s definitely a bittersweet thing,” he said of Vermont Yankee’s final chapter. “We’re ready to move on and redevelop this site.”
