With Entergy announcing an end-date for Vermont Yankee, we have only a moment to shout “hurray” before returning to the ugly reality of decommissioning, and the likelihood that Entergy cannot be counted on to foot the bill.
As Arnie Gundersen has been telling us for years, there isn’t enough money in the decommissioning kitty to do the job.
Even though Entergy has satisfied the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s minimum requirement for the decommissioning fund, that is far from the end of the story.
One can safely posit that, given the Commission’s adopted mission as “industry cheerleader,” the $566-million minimum established by the NRC is a profoundly conservative figure which assumes an ongoing operation generating new revenues and allowing interest to build over a twenty-year span.
After all, didn’t the NRC just re-up VY for another twenty years? That must make it so!
Even without incident
Gundersen believes the cleanup will cost $250 million more than what’s in there now.
And if the worst should happen? (from Seven Days)
Based on Gundersen’s experience decommissioning of other nukes around the country, he recommends that Vermont regulators remain diligent watching for underground leaks of radioactive material, including cesium, cobalt and strontium which are “incredibly difficult to detect from above.”
Such a leak at Connecticut Yankee, he notes, raised the cleanup costs by about $1 billion.
Ken PIcard of Seven Days quotes Arnie as saying,
“Let’s hope the stock market doesn’t collapse again,”
Let us, indeed; but even without a financial collapse, nuclear’s recently ascendant star appears to be on the wane, owing to market forces and loss of consumer confidence.
Entergy, with its “slightly used” fleet of leaky, creaky reactors is among the most vulnerable.
This is the gang who can’t shoot straight. Remember last year’s Superbowl blackout, courtesy of Entergy? And how about the worker who was recently killed at Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear Power Plant?
But I need not go on. Have a listen to Arnie’s new podcast on the Fairewinds Energy Education website.
While you’re at it, how about hitting that “donate” button, for all the advocacy work that remains ahead in order to ensure our safety from nuclear folly?
Sue correctly quotes 7 Days quoting Arnie, but somehow my guess is that the quote is wrong.
There’s roughly $580M in the decommissioning fund as of the end of July, so an extra $250M (as the quote suggests) would get you to $830M.
Entergy’s testimony in Docket 7862 is substantially higher than that. They offered a variety of scenarios, but the cheapest was $845M and most are around $1 billion. The State’s and CLF’s experts challenged Entergy’s estimates in a variety of ways, but all of which suggested that these figures would be too low. When I’ve heard directly from Arnie on the topic, he’s also suggested that Entergy’s estimates are way too low, and I’d be quite surprised if he’s suddenly changed his mind. I’d be curious where the 7 Days quote came from.
Like nuclear hasn’t enjoyed a flawed enablement system that artificially deflated its prices for years!
“Design Flaws.”
Yeah, funny how they never admitted to the fundamental “design flaws” in the reactor, no matter how many times Arnie pointed them out.
Now they are co-opting the same language to blame the market for their failure to keep Ol’ Leaky going.
And here I thought all along that the “market” knew best.