The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant decommissioning is a slow moving process and Duxbury’s Nuclear Advisory Committee is keeping tabs on every move they make.
WATD’s David Cedrone has the story:
The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant closed back in May of 2019 and since then a few structures have been moved and a pad built for the casks that will hold the spent nuclear fuel.
Jim Lampert with Duxbury’s Nuclear Advisory Committee says the next step is for the site to be tested for contaminates although he does not have a lot of faith it will be done in a timely fashion.
Once the spent fuel is stored in concrete casks they will be stored on site because there is nowhere else they can be brought to due to the risk of contamination.
Lampert says when the concrete casks are loaded with spent fuel they will be roughly 60 of them and has the potential to cause roughly half of the damage done in the nuclear accident in Chernobyl.
Pilgrim closed their doors due to low wholesale energy prices and has a decommissioning fund of roughly a billion dollars which the committee says is not enough to do the job correctly.
The group is looking to file 3 bills with legislature that would prevent the state from picking up the tab if they run out of funds.
