Wastewater from closed Plymouth nuclear plant continues to evaporate. What's the plan?

As Holtec International — the company decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth — waits for the state to issue a final determination on its plan to dispose of radioactive wastewater from the shuttered plant in Cape Cod Bay, the water continues to evaporate through Pilgrim’s stacks.

Around 888,000 gallons of wastewater used in plant operations remain — down from 1.1 million gallons in January 2022 — comprising 40,000 gallons in the plant’s torus, a doughnut-shaped pressure suppression chamber, 347,000 gallons in the spent fuel pool, 461,000 gallons in the dryer separator pit and reactor cavity, and 40,000 gallons in other plant systems and piping, according to Holtec.

The ultimate fate of Pilgrim’s remaining wastewater is uncertain. It must be disposed of — either through discharge into Cape Cod Bay, evaporation or transport to an out-of-state facility — before Holtec can demolish the plant and clear the site.

What is the background?

Last year, after fierce and sustained resistance from area residents, fishermen, politicians and environmental scientists, the state Department of Environmental Protection issued a draft denial of Holtec’s plan to discharge the plant’s contaminated wastewater into Cape Cod Bay, a method of wastewater disposal used at other decommissioned nuclear power plants, including in Fukushima, Japan.

In its draft denial, the state environmental agency said Cape Cod Bay is a protected ocean sanctuary under the state's Ocean Sanctuaries Act, which prohibits dumping industrial waste into protected state waters.

Holtec representatives have said the state's draft denial derailed the company’s plans for disposing of the contaminated wastewater, which was periodically discharged into the bay while the plant was operating, resulting in a years-long delay in decommissioning the plant. Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, which began generating power for the electric grid in 1972, stopped producing electricity in 2019.

“The projected date of completion is 2035, having moved from 2027 to deal with the issues associated with water,” Patrick O’Brien, director of government affairs and communications for Holtec International, told the Times in an email.

No timeline for a final decision from state agency

Though the state issued its draft denial of Holtec’s plan to dispose of the plant’s wastewater in Cape Cod Bay last year, the state environmental agency's Seth Pickering said this week there is still no timeline for the final determination’s issuance. When the determination is issued, Holtec could appeal, resulting in further delay.

Association to Preserve Cape Cod Executive Director Andrew Gottlieb, a member of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, told the Times that in the meantime, Holtec is “taking advantage of the confusion, the inertia, and the opportunity to evaporate as much water off as they can under the guise of warming their workers.”

On Monday, Holtec Senior Compliance Manager David Noyes told members of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel that the company plans to remove two 20,000 gallon fuel tanks over the next six weeks that have allowed the company to heat the plant using conventional fuel. The tanks scheduled for removal are the last of seven underground fuel tanks once on the site, according to O’Brien.

Without conventional fuel

Without conventional fuel, when outside temperatures drop again, Holtec will likely provide heat for decommissioning workers using immersion heaters that increase the temperature of the wastewater at the plant, thereby heating the buildings.

Holtec might not wait for cold weather to reenergize the immersion heaters, which were switched off on March 18, because the heaters also allow plant workers to dry out waste from the reactor vessel in preparation for disposal more quickly, Noyes told citizens advisory panel members.

“The time for the drying can be significantly reduced based on elevated temperatures of the water, so the ability to be able to heat the water in the spent fuel pool while we package the waste provides significant efficiency improvements to be able to process that waste and stage it,” Noyes said this week.

“The plan would be to energize the heaters again when they're required, either for class B and C waste processing, which we don't currently have a scheduled date for, or when they're required for the next heating season,” he added.

Accelerating evaporation?

Gottlieb criticized Holtec representatives for failing to acknowledge that the immersion heaters also accelerate evaporation of wastewater through the plant’s stacks into the surrounding environment, a method of wastewater disposal that he called unacceptable.

According to O’Brien, there is “some difference” in the rate at which process wastewater evaporates when the immersion heaters are used compared to when they are not, but the company has not quantified that difference.

In 2022, Holtec informed the citizens advisory panel that 650,000 gallons of industrial wastewater had evaporated over the previous two years using “heat from the fuel in the pool,” according to O’Brien.

“There were no comments/concerns at that time from the panel,” O’Brien said.

Some shipment of wastewater expected

O’Brien, who said evaporation will happen with or without immersion heaters, told the Times that some wastewater will likely need to be shipped for disposal eventually.

“At some point you may reach a concentration of non-radiological constituents in a small volume of water that would require shipping,” O’Brien said. “So as we have said from the beginning it would most likely be a combination of all options.”

Two years ago, when wastewater levels were over 1 million gallons, Holtec International’s CEO estimated it would cost the company roughly $20 million to ship wastewater from the plant to an out-of-state disposal site. Holtec has been shipping other waste from the decommissioning process to licensed out-of-state facilities over the past few years, reportedly without incident.

Intentions of Holtec questioned

Gottlieb thinks the company — which recently agreed to pay settlements over alleged mishandling of decommissioning funds and, separately, mishandling of asbestos during decommissioning work — is trying to reduce costs at the expense of area residents and the environment.

By appealing the state’s denial of its plan to dispose of contaminated wastewater in Cape Cod Bay, Holtec could delay decommissioning until the plant’s water has evaporated, saving the company millions, Gottlieb said.

“They avoid storage costs, they avoid transportation costs,” Gottlieb said. “They expose the people of Plymouth and the surrounding environment, depending on which way the wind is blowing, to atmospheric radiation. But they save money, which means they increase the bottom line profit, which means they've done a good job from Holtec's perspective.”

Shipment of wastewater out of state

Jim Lampert, chair of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, said that other nuclear plants, including one in Vermont, have successfully disposed of contaminated wastewater by shipping it out of state — Lampert’s preferred disposal method.

But he and Gottlieb acknowledged that the citizens advisory panel — composed of volunteers that meet once every two months — has no authority over decommissioning decisions.

Gottlieb said the group doesn’t even have the resources or collective experience needed to vet the information Holtec provides at their meetings.

“You have a company as your primary entity over which you're supposedly exerting some oversight, but it is also your primary source of information and has demonstrated a stunning lack of transparency, respect or concern for the local interests that exist to make sure this gets done expeditiously, safely and properly,” Gottlieb said.

If the advisory panel were to be given resources by the commonwealth, "technical resources that it could use to hire and rely on to critically evaluate the progress and information that Holtec is providing, that would go some distance,” he said, adding that he plans to make that request to Gov. Maura Healey’s office in coming weeks.

Jeannette Hinkle is a reporter for Cape Cod Times. Reach her at jhinkle@capecodonline.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Holtec says it will take conventional heating fuel tanks from plant