Closing Davis-Besse will be “devastating” to community, says NRC manager
PORT CLINTON, Ohio -- An unexpectedly small crowd showed up Tuesday evening at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual meeting to talk about the performance of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant.
Davis-Besse’s more than 600 employees operated the plant safely with one minor citation, said NRC managers.
Surprisingly, the small turnout had few questions about FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company’s announcement in April that it would close Davis-Besee by May 31, 2020.
James Cameron, an NRC manager responsible for power plant inspections, said Davis-Besse’s closing would be “devastating” when asked by a Toledo reporter what the impact of the closing would be on the community.
Cameron said close scrutiny by on-site resident inspectors would continue -- with an eye toward determining whether the closing is affecting the morale of the plant employees,whether the company is managing to keep staffing levels adequate to safely operate the plant or whether the backlog of maintenance projects is developing.
“At this point, we have not identified any problems at the plant attributive to financial issues,” he said.
Shawn Harwood, an NRC financial analyst responsible for determining whether the trust funds established to pay for decommissioning are sufficient, said the funds were adequate as of March 2017, the last publicly available decommissioning report FENOC filed with the NRC.
Harwood said the total cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant is between $600 million and nearly $1 billion. The process can take up to 60 years, he said.
Following the company’s formal, written notification to the NRC in April that it intended to close Davis-Besse as well as the Perry nuclear power plant east of Cleveland and the two-reactor Beaver Valley plant near Pittsburgh, the regulatory agency’s Midwest division issued a “preliminary notification” to the public acknowledging the planned shutdowns.
The notification also stated that the decommissioning funds as the company reported them in March 2017 were sufficient to meet minimum requirements, without contributions from parent company FirstEnergy Corp.
That 2017 report was based on Dec. 31, 2016, funding levels, assumed the power plants would close when their licenses expired and that the trust funds would earn a steady 2 percent annual return for years into the future.
The NRC in April also asked the Justice Department to notify the federal bankruptcy court that it wanted the trust funds preserved during the bankruptcy process.
An NRC spokesman at the time said the company would now have to make annual reports on the health of the trust funds. He said the company and agency analysis would now include the early closings.
“The company may need to make an adjustment in the fund to be able to show reasonable assurance” that the funds for each reactor are still adequate, said NRC spokesman David McIntyre.
In an earlier interview, Harwood said FENOC would have to provide the commission with a “site-specific decommissioning cost estimate” rather than relying on the generic NRC formulas it had used for Davis-Besse and Perry power plants in the past.
“They will owe us, at a minimum, a preliminary decommissioning cost estimate,” he said of the company’s next trust fund status report due in the spring of 2019. The agency would need a much more detailed estimate after that, he said.
Once FENOC shuts down each reactor, it will have two years to provide the NRC with a “detailed cost estimate of the whole decommissioning process,” said Harwood.
By regulation, that decommissioning process can take up to 60 years. It can begin with a plant owner shutting down the reactor, removing the radioactive fuel-rod assemblies from the reactor core and placing them in a cooling pool -- for five to 10 years or even longer while the radioactivity naturally declines.
The NRC calls that “SAFSTOR” and sees it as a way to protect those workers who will demolish a reactor and dispose of low-level radioactive materials. FENOC appears to be planning to do just that, based on documents it filed with the NRC earlier.
A FENOC spokesman attending the NRC meeting Tuesday said the company plans to put all three of its power plants in SAFSTOR once they are shut down and the fuel rod assemblies placed in cooling pools.
And that is part of the reason that the Midwest-based Environmental Law and Policy Center and several other consumer and environmental groups raised the issue of inadequate decommissioning funds with the NRC in March, just days before the company petitioned for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Howard Learner, executive director of the ELPC said SAFSTOR will prevent towns that hosted nuclear power plants from re-developing the land for many decades.
The ELPC also believes -- but has yet to prove -- that the early shutdowns mean the trust funds will turn out to be inadequate over time, and that parent company FirstEnergy will meanwhile escape responsibility for contributing new money to the trust funds.
