PLYMOUTH — Holtec Decommissioning International has misspent money from the decommissioning trust funds at all four nuclear plants it owns, using it to pay for activities like parades and softball games when federal regulations restrict the use to decommissioning of the reactors and cleaning up the contaminated sites.
Holtec has also spent close to a half million dollars in decommissioning trust funds on lobbying related to Pilgrim since 2019. That expense, however, is allowed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), according to spokesman Neil Sheehan.
Four nuclear facilities — Pilgrim in Plymouth, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Indian Point in New York, and Palisades in Michigan — are owned by Holtec’s decommissioning arm. All four plants are currently closed, and all but Palisades are in various stages of decommissioning; the company is currently working to restart the Michigan reactor, however.
The company’s purchase of the plants is part of an arrangement that provides Holtec with trust funds amounting to billions in taxpayer money, set aside specifically to cover decommissioning costs.
While the amounts of money improperly spent from the funds are small, critics say they reflect Holtec’s pattern of ignoring regulations.
“Holtec’s motto is ‘It is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission — much cheaper, too,’ ” said Mary Lampert, director of the activist group Pilgrim Watch and a member of the citizens advisory committee on Pilgrim’s decommissioning.
The company blamed the misappropriation on clerical errors in the case of one plant but has not yet offered explanations in the other three cases. The NRC has given the company 30 days to provide reasons for the violations.
Holtec appeared to be a generous corporate partner last year, donating $84,000 to the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, the town’s annual Thanksgiving celebration, and similar local events. The donation didn’t come out of Holtec’s wallet, however. The company used Pilgrim’s decommissioning trust fund to make those gifts.
The NRC chastised Holtec in a Feb. 29 letter, saying that community celebrations are not “legitimate decommissioning activities.”
When Holtec took ownership of Pilgrim in 2019, the $1.1-billion decommissioning trust fund was part of the deal — what remains in the trust after decommissioning ends is retained by the company as profit. As of December 2022, $518 million remained in the account. Holtec representatives recently extended the timeline for decommissioning Pilgrim by eight years to give the fund time to earn more interest.
On the same day it sent its notice to Holtec regarding the expenses at Pilgrim, the NRC sent a violation notice to the company regarding improper use of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant’s decommissioning fund. There, the company used $62,000 from the fund for a “celebration day for Lacey Township, donation to a food bank and certain upgrades to the local community.”
Holtec issued the same statement to news media regarding the violations at Pilgrim and at Oyster Creek: “We take our responsibility as watchful stewards of the trust fund very seriously. We are also deeply committed to our local communities we serve as part of the decommissioning process. It is in that spirit as a strong community partner that these charitable expenditures were made, as part of our regular community outreach and engagement activities. We take any violation very seriously and have already taken corrective actions to ensure the amount was restored to the trust fund, with interest, and that this issue does not recur with our future community and charitable contributions.”
At Indian Point in New York, Holtec spent $63,000 from the decommissioning trust fund on events such as parades and softball teams. The NRC wrote to Holtec on Feb. 22, saying that the company had violated the fund’s restrictions.
In these three cases, Holtec has been ordered to provide federal regulators with a timeline for paying the money back to the trust funds and an outline of measures taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In Michigan, between January and March 2023, Holtec improperly used $57,000 from the Palisades decommissioning fund for activities related to the restart of the reactor as well as on community events. In a letter sent to Holtec on Feb. 20, federal regulators chastised the company but said it would not cite it with a violation notice because Holtec had entered it into its “corrective action program” and was already working to restore the money.
Regarding its infraction at Palisades, Holtec had claimed it had inadvertently used the decommissioning fund because of “mis-coding,” according to the NRC’s inspection report. Holtec performed “additional training of staff” to avoid future missteps, the inspection report said.
Holtec purchased the Palisades plant in Covert, Mich. in June 2022 shortly after it was permanently shut down. While the company initially planned to decommission the reactor, it has since reversed that decision and is working on restarting it.
Last month, Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell filed a civil complaint against Holtec in Suffolk Superior Court for a long list of violations related to improper handling and disposal of asbestos-laced debris. As part of a settlement Holtec agreed to pay $200,000.
The focus at the March 25 meeting of the Pilgrim Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel will once again be on the disposal of radioactive wastewater, which also contains several other nonradioactive pollutants.
The Mass. Department of Environmental Protection has directed Holtec to provide an analysis of the contaminants known to be in the wastewater, based on sampling done last April and any additional pollutants that may have been released into the water since then.
The company proposes to filter the wastewater and release it into Cape Cod Bay and has applied for the state and federal permits required to do that. Meanwhile the company has evaporated 200,000 gallons of the 1.1 million total from the reactor building’s vents, using submersible heaters to speed up the process.
