BRATTLEBORO — It took more than a year to pull off, but it looks like the proposed sale of the defunct Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to a New York-based decommissioning company is moving closer to taking place.
On March 2, a memorandum of understanding was filed with the Vermont Public Utilities Commission. It calls for Entergy, the current owner of Vermont Yankee, and NorthStar, the company that wants to buy the Vernon site and decommission it, to set aside additional money - up to $200 million - to do the work.
Another part of the agreement has Entergy and NorthStar agreeing to new restoration standards and a comprehensive review of contamination of the plant site.
Three state agencies and nine out of the 10 intervenors reviewing the sale of the plant to NorthStar - including the harshest critic of the deal, the New England Coalition - agreed to support the memorandum.
“We now consider ourselves allies and partners with NorthStar and will do our best to help them achieve a state-of-the-art, best-practices, and environmentally responsible decommissioning, as free of nuclear pollution as possible,” Ray Shadis, a New England Coalition board member and adviser, said in a news release.
Besides Entergy, NorthStar, and the Coalition, others agreeing to the deal included the state Public Service Department, the state attorney general's office and the state Agency of Natural Resources; the Elnu Abenaki tribe; Windham Regional Commission; and the Vernon Planning and Economic Development Commission.
The only intervenor that failed to sign on was the Conservation Law Foundation.
“Vermonters are the losers in a recent agreement aimed to sweeten the deal for the sale of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant,” Foundation Senior Attorney Sandra Levine said in a news release.
“In a rush to secure a possible - and by no means certain - quick clean-up of the site, the settlement excludes reasonable protection for Vermont communities,” Levine added. “The deal Entergy and NorthStar proposed leaves Vermonters vulnerable to picking up the tab if something goes wrong.”
However, Levine said the Foundation will participate in the upcoming Public Utilities Commission hearings on the sale.
Vermont Yankee closed in December of 2014. Originally, Entergy had planned to wait up to 60 years to begin decommissioning the nuclear plant. NorthStar has said it can decommission the site faster - by 2030, at the latest - and less expensively than Entergy.
The question of whether NorthStar can live up to that commitment has been the source of most of the friction generated over months of public hearings.
Another source of debate has been who would be responsible if NorthStar failed to meet agreed-to standards for clean-up and site restoration.
There still is a formal review process of the memorandum of agreement that will take place in the coming weeks. The Public Utilities Commission is expected to announce a date soon for a public hearing on the memorandum, and both Entergy and NorthStar want the Commission to issue a decision by July 31.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission must also approve the deal.
Entergy wants to wrap up its sale of the plant to NorthStar by the end of 2018, but that can't happen until the Public Utilities Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission give their approval.