SOME PREDICT TROUBLE OVER RUBBLE AT VERMONT YANKEE, VT DIGGER
MAY. 3, 2017, BY MIKE FAHER VERNON – Tearing down Vermont Yankee could produce more than 2.1 million cubic feet of crushed concrete.
And new documents show that more than half of that concrete – 1.1 million cubic feet – might be buried on site as part of a “rubblization” plan developed by NorthStar Group Services, the company that wants to buy the shut-down Vernon nuclear plant.
Both NorthStar and current plant owner Entergy pledge that only clean concrete will be used as fill. And administrators are touting the plan’s benefits, saying it will save millions of dollars and keep thousands of trucks off local roads.
Vermont Yankee has “large quantities of uncontaminated concrete acceptable for reuse as fill that would provide economic benefits, with no health or safety risk due to residual radioactivity, and avoid unnecessary traffic, transportation and disposal offsite,” Steven Scheurich, an Entergy vice president, wrote in documents filed with the state Public Service Board.
But the proposal could prove to be a sticking point for state officials and activists. Ray Shadis, a technical adviser with the watchdog group New England Coalition, argues that NorthStar is planning, “in essence, a capped landfill.”
“It’s a very important issue for us,” Shadis said. “It’s a major issue.”
Entergy is seeking approval from the Vermont Public Service Board and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to sell Vermont Yankee to NorthStar, a New York-based decommissioning company.
NorthStar says it can clean up most of the site – with the exception of a spent fuel storage facility – by 2030 and possibly as early as 2026. That’s decades sooner than Entergy had been planning.
But some observers are wondering about NorthStar’s ability to follow through on its promises. That skepticism – or, at the very least, curiosity – is apparent in the 10 entities that have been granted permission to intervene in the Public Service Board’s deliberations.
In late April, NorthStar and Entergy filed hundreds of pages of responses to discovery questions posed by some of those intervenors. The documents cover a variety of issues, but restoration and future use of the Vermont Yankee site are prominent topics……..https://vtdigger.org/2017/05/03/predict-trouble-rubble-vermont-yankee/
