After five years of contentious meetings, regulatory delays
and mounting impatience on the part of plant owners and pro-nuclear
politicians, the Pilgrim nuclear plant’s relicensing may see its final hearing
Wednesday night.
First licensed in 1972, the 685-megawatt boiling water
reactor in Plymouth, Mass., has been under consideration for a license renewal since
2006. While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to deny any of the other 48
license renewals it has considered so far, the process at Pilgrim dragged on
well beyond the 22 to 30 months the relicensing process usually takes.
Relicensing at the Vermont Yankee plant, also owned by Entergy, also has taken
more than five years.
Entergy applied for a 20-year renewal that would allow the Massachusetts
reactor to operate until 2032. According to an official quoted in the Boston
Globe, NRC completed its environmental review in 2007. But a series of
challenges by anti-nuclear groups resulted in further hearings and delays. It
took so long that Senators David Vitter, R-La., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., recently
sent a letter to the NRC chairman complaining that the agency has created a
“two-tiered” process, one for license renewals that face little resistance and another
for renewals that are contested by environmental groups. Earlier, Rep. Fred
Upton, R.-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee made his own
call for more “transparency and certainty” in the renewal process.
The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will hold what
is expected to be the last hearing on the Pilgrim relicensing Wednesday as it hears
testimony from plant opponents related to emergency planning and maintenance
issues.