The internal parts of the nuclear reactor at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station have been dismantled and are now being packaged for disposal as radioactive waste.
They will be shipped to a licensed facility in West Texas and buried, said Patrick O’Brien, a spokesman for Holtec International, the company that owns Pilgrim.
The work is part of the ongoing decommissioning of the power plant. The Pilgrim reactor was shut down in 2019.
Finishing the latest task — the dismantling of the reactor’s internal parts, known as segmentation — represents a “significant milestone,” said David Noyes, a compliance manager at Holtec, in remarks Monday to the state’s Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel.
“All of the individual pieces within the reactor vessel have been removed, segmented, and are in the process of being packaged for ultimate staging on site and then shipment,” he said. “We are in the process of demobilizing the equipment that was required in order to be able to perform that activity.”
The parts are radiologically contaminated and require special handling and disposal. Once packaged, they will go by truck or truck-to-rail, depending on their size, to the Waste Control Specialists facility in Texas.
Meanwhile, the fate of about 1 million gallons of contaminated water in the plant’s reactor system is still in dispute, and Holtec is pursuing a new strategy to seek permission to discharge the water into Cape Cod Bay.
The company plans to include the water discharge in a permit application — the five-year renewal of its state water discharge permit, which is due later this year, Noyes said.
Holtec previously sought permission to release the water by applying for a modification of its existing discharge permit, but the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection denied the request.
The company filed an appeal for state adjudication, similar to a court case. The appeal is just getting started.
As the decommissioning continues, part of Pilgrim’s waterfront property in Plymouth is expected to be available for reuse by 2035. But spent nuclear fuel will remain stored on the site.
