Closing Indian Point: NRC Coming To Cortlandt

CORTLANDT, NY — Two upcoming meetings about the closure of Indian Point will tackle various issues about the decommissioning of the nuclear plant. Operations at Indian Point 2 will end by April 30, 2020 and Indian Point 3 will stop by April 30, 2021.

The first is a joint meeting of the community's and the state's task forces, coming up Wednesday.

The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in the Vincent Nyberg General Meeting room, Cortlandt Town Hall, 1 Heady Street, Cortlandt Manor, NY. Town Supervisor Linda Puglisi and NYS PSC Executive Deputy Thomas Congdon will co-chair the meeting along with Village of Buchanan Mayor Theresa Knickerbocker and Hendrick Hudson School District Superintendent Joseph Hochreiter. Representatives from Entergy and Holtec, the company that is buying the plant, will attend. All meetings are open for the public to observe.

On Oct. 2 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled a public meeting at the Morabito Community Center, 29 Westbrook Drive, Cortlandt Manor, NY 10567. That meeting will start at 6 p.m.

The reason for the second meeting is a new federal law that requires the NRC to provide a report to Congress identifying best practices for establishing and operating local community advisory boards to foster communication between a decommissioning licensee and a local community.

Locally, municipal and school officials are scrambling to deal with the loss of the plant. Entergy is half of the village of Buchanan's tax base, one-third of the Hendrick Hudson school district's annual tax base, pays $1 million a year to the town of Cortlandt and pays Westchester $4.5 million a year in lieu of taxes. It employs close to 1,000 people.

Residents are also concerned about what will happen to the site after decommissioning: what can be repurposed and what will be done to store the spent nuclear fuel forever.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, radioactive waste is also generated while decommissioning and dismantling nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities. There are two broad classifications: high-level or low-level waste. High-level waste is primarily spent fuel removed from reactors after producing electricity. Low-level waste comes from reactor operations. Spent fuel is thermally hot as well as highly radioactive and requires remote handling and shielding.

The cumulative amount from the three Nuclear Decommissioning Trust Funds at Indian Point (units 1, 2 and 3) was $1.85 billion as of Dec. 31, 2018.

The NRC is supposed to report to Congress by June 2020 about:

• the type of topics that could be brought before a community advisory board
• how the board's input could inform the decision-making process of stakeholders for various decommissioning activities
• how the board could interact with the NRC and other Federal regulatory bodies to promote dialogue between the licensee and affected stakeholders
• how the board could offer opportunities for public engagement throughout all phases of the decommissioning process
• the composition of existing community advisory boards and best practices identified during the establishment and operation of such boards.

SEE ALSO:

• Thorny Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Issues
• Op-Ed: Indian Point Should Be Decommissioned, Cleaned Up ASAP
• Entergy Sells The Indian Point Nuclear Plant