PLYMOUTH — Holtec International can’t release one drop of its million gallons of wastewater from the former Pilgrim nuclear plant into Cape Cod Bay because doing so would violate the state’s Ocean Sanctuaries Act, say attorneys for the Association to Preserve Cape Cod (APCC). And what’s in the water shouldn’t matter, they argue.
In a letter sent to state officials in mid-February and made public on April 10, attorneys Lisa Goodheart, Dylan Sanders, and Alessandra Wingerter of the Boston firm Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak & Cohen state the act prohibits any new discharge of industrial waste into Cape Cod Bay because it is a designated ocean sanctuary.
The law dates to the 1970s. As long as discharges were related to the operation and maintenance of active power generation facilities, they were not prohibited if they complied with relevant regulations, according to the letter. But Pilgrim no longer generates electricity, so radioactive wastewater related to decommissioning would be a “new industrial discharge,” which would violate the law, the attorneys wrote.
Previous arguments about what Holtec Decommissioning is permitted to do with the wastewater remaining in systems there focused on radioactive contaminants and other pollutants the wastewater may contain. The untreated wastewater was recently sampled and is being tested.
Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the APCC and a member of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel (NDCAP), told the Independent that the Ocean Sanctuaries Act “provides a very clear statement by the legislature.
“The introduction of wastewater to Cape Cod Bay,” he said, “is simply and flatly prohibited.” There should be no need to research possible harm or discuss various standards for pollutants, he added. State officials should simply be able to invoke the act to deny Holtec a discharge permit.
Meanwhile, Holtec is still working to find its way around regulatory challenges. Late last month, the company applied for a modification of its wastewater discharge permit that would allow it to treat the water for nonradioactive contaminants and then release it.
The letter on behalf of the APCC was directed to state Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper and to Lisa Berry Engler, director of the Office of Coastal Zone Management, the agency that oversees the state’s ocean sanctuaries. It asks CZM to notify Holtec that the sanctuary law prohibits the release of the wastewater.
The letter also asks CZM to notify the DEP that the discharge is not eligible for new or modified discharge or water quality permits, which the DEP issues.
A spokesperson for the Healey-Driscoll administration recently stated: “Massachusetts agencies will carefully review all permit modification applications and analyze compliance with all applicable laws.”
“It’s time for the attorney general to tell DEP that ‘applicable laws’ forbid what Holtec wants to do,” said James Lampert, a member of NDCAP.
“We expect the state to step up and enforce the laws,” said Harwich resident Diane Turco, director of the Cape Downwinders, an advocacy group working to halt the release of the wastewater into the bay.
Gottlieb said the debate over the wastewater, which has been ongoing since November 2021, is a distraction.
“There are sequential actions around the physical decommissioning of that facility that require significant public oversight,” he said. “Because all we ever talk about is this disposition of water into the bay, not enough time is being spent looking under the hood and holding Holtec to its obligations.”
At the advisory panel’s March 27 meeting, Holtec maintained that its end dates for decommissioning had not changed, Gottlieb said. In fact, he said, Holtec “had filed a report with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission saying they were adding four years to the endpoint to finish decommissioning and release of the site.”
Those are the kind of things the NDCAP should be thinking about, said Gottlieb. Instead, he said, the advisory panel and others are stuck “spinning our wheels arguing about something that’s fundamentally illegal, and at the end of the day, they’re not going to be allowed to do.”
Holtec spokesman Patrick O’Brien confirmed the company applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for a federal discharge permit on March 31 and to DEP for state authorization on April 4. He declined to comment further, other than to add, “We look forward to following the process set forth.”
