Much work remains as Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station moves toward decommissioning

PLYMOUTH – At first glance, not much has changed at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station since it shut down for a final time a year and a half ago. The big reactor building still looms large over the site, which includes dozens of smaller structures.

However, upon closer inspection, the changes are more evident. Two cranes reach skyward next to a tall emissions stack, ready to assist with the take down. Around the site, about half a dozen empty concrete pads mark the places where support buildings once stood. Inside the remaining buildings, rows upon rows of cubicles lay empty.

“We’ve removed about six or seven buildings so far,” says Patrick O’Brien, manager of Communications and Government Affairs for Comprehensive Decommissioning International, a division of Holtec International, owner of the plant, which purchased it to handle the decommissioning. “We’re at about 160 employees now, down from about 600 last year. Most of them work in security.”

Decommissioning of the nuclear power plant is making steady progress, O’Brien reports. Workers are dismantling Pilgrim, which once generated 690 megawatts of electricity and paid tens of millions in tax revenue to the town since it went online 48 years ago.

“Right now we’re on track with decommissioning,” O’Brien says. “If there are no issues, we expect to be done by 2027. It doesn’t take that long to do this work.”

Inside the reactor building, crews continue to carefully remove rod assemblies from the spent-fuel cooling pool. So far, nearly 2,000 of the 4,114 assemblies have been extracted and stored in massive dry casks. Made of reinforced concrete and steel, each cask weighs around 150 tons when fully loaded.

Currently, 28 casks sit on a large concrete pad near the reactor building 25 feet above sea level. By 2022, they – along with an estimated 33 other casks – will move up a hill to a new storage site at 75 feet elevation to be further away from potential coastal flooding caused by climate change.

“We’ll be using a huge mover to relocate the casks,” O’Brien says. “They travel at about a half-mile an hour, so it will take about two hours to move each one.”

Construction is ongoing at the new pad. Workers are busily pouring concrete for the large site – about the size of a school gymnasium – and erecting rebar for the four-foot thick concrete barriers that will ring the site.

O’Brien expects it will take January 2022 to completely remove the spent-fuel rod assemblies and place them in the casks on the pad. There they will remain for the foreseeable future – perhaps forever. There is no plan in place to relocate this highly radioactive material to a safer storage facility as was promised by the federal government before Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station opened in 1972. Protests negated a proposal to move it to the Yucca National Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada.

“The federal government promised us Plymouth would not become a storage site for nuclear waste,” says Select Board Chair Ken Tavares, who toured the mountain site while it was being built in the 1980s.

“Our guide took us around the place, then told us it would never open because of all the protests,” he recalls. “I was stunned. I remember thinking, ‘What are we going to do?’”

That matter remains a bone of contention for the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel as well. What will happen with all that highly radioactive waste being held in storage in Plymouth? And just how secure are the dry-cask containers that hold it? Critics are concerned about the longevity and monitoring of the system while in Plymouth.

“The number-one issue is the siting of spent fuel,” says NDCAP chair and former Select Board member John Mahoney. “Is it going to be here in Plymouth in perpetuity? The federal government abdicated its responsibility years ago. We need to continue working at the federal and state levels, as well as with Holtec, to make sure this site is as safe and clean as possible once the cleanup process is completed.”

While regulators and the nuclear industry try to figure out what to do with the spent fuel, which can take up to 25,000 years to degrade, low-level radioactive waste is being prepared for shipment to West Texas. Class B and C materials, including huge shield blocks, lay sealed and wrapped waiting for Department of Energy sanction to be moved.

“They’ve been cut up and coated in a protective material,” O’Brien says. “We’ll probably ship them out by truck.”

Restoring the site to its original condition will take some doing. In addition to removing all the buildings and replanting vegetation, CDI needs to make sure radioactivity levels are down to a bare minimum. In its settlement with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office earlier this year, Holtec agreed to readings of no more than 10 millirems – about the equivalent of a chest X-ray – for partial site release.

“The NRC requirement for decommissioning is 25 millirems,” O’Brien observes. “It will be clean under Massachusetts standards.”

The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes. How that progresses in the near future is something NDCAP plans to closely monitor as more of the facility is decommissioned and the project nears completion.

“The lines of communication have been open,” Mahoney says. “Holtec has been fairly open about the process so far. They’ve done a good job to date, but we will be gauging their efforts closely over the next three to five years.”

For better or worse, Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station has been a major factor in the development of Plymouth for nearly five decades. The tax money paid to the town and growth boom it helped generate, as well as the question of what to do with the radioactive waste, have had a significant impact on this community – and will likely continue to do so in the future.

 “Pilgrim helped Plymouth grow,” O’Brien says. “We wouldn’t be the community we are today if it wasn’t for this place.”