Nearly a year has passed since the owner of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station applied to the state to discharge radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay, and the state — which issued a draft denial last summer — hasn’t finalized its decision.
Now the company, Holtec International, is talking to CAI about the fate of the water if it were shipped to a licensed disposal facility out of state, as local activists hope.
How the radioactive water would be handled at such a facility depends, in part, on Holtec’s waste contractor at the time, company spokesman Patrick O’Brien said. Right now, the contractor is Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
“It would depend on who we have a contract with at any particular time,” he said. “But … I wouldn't say that, you know, when it comes time to dispose of the water, that's necessarily the contract we may have.”
He said the current contractor would likely mix the water with a solidifying agent and bury it.
But Holtec has looked at facilities in Tennessee that would be more apt to discharge the radioactive water or evaporate it, he said.
Evaporation is already happening at Pilgrim. In November, David Noyes, who represents Holtec on the state panel on Pilgrim, said about 950,000 gallons of water remained inside the plant — a loss of 150,000 gallons from the 1.1 million held at the plant nine months prior.
Holtec says the evaporation is the result of plant operations that use heaters to warm the water, combined with natural evaporation — not an intentional disposal of water through evaporation.
Holtec has not chosen shipping as a primary method of removing the water from Pilgrim because of the risk that a trucking accident would cause a spill, O’Brien said.
Local activists have pointed to the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in the southeastern corner of Vermont as a model, because it shipped a far larger amount of water. But O’Brien said Vermont Yankee’s direct access to a rail spur — which allowed shipping by train — made shipping safer in that case. Pilgrim’s water would go by tanker truck.
He said Holtec may eventually have no choice but to ship a small volume of water if the radioactivity becomes concentrated. That’s one of the reasons company representatives have indicated that Pilgrim might use multiple disposal methods, he said.
Shipping would also cost Holtec a lot of money.
“There is a pretty significant cost associated with that,” he said, adding that facilities typically charge per gallon. “And it's a pretty — pretty hefty price to do so.”
Two years ago, Kris Singh, the founder of Holtec and its president and CEO, told Senator Ed Markey that trucking the water would cost the company about $20 million.
