As the Vermont Department of Health and the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant agree that tritium-contaminated water from the plant is moving toward the Connecticut River, a plan to bundle a relicensed Vermont Yankee with five other plants owned by Entergy of Louisiana and spin them off into a new company has hit a snag.
The New York State Public Service Commission has found that the spinoff into a new company to be called Enexus would not be in the public interest (see "New York AG: No to Nuke Spinoff," Feb. 4, 2010).
New England media coverage of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant near Brattleboro has seldom mentioned the relationship of Vermont Yankee to its sister plants in New York State. Finally the New York connection has moved into the limelight. Insofar as findings in New York affect Enexus, they affect the Vermont plant as well; they also suggest that Entergy's alleged disingenuousness in its dealings with Vermont—its failure to disclose the existence of underground pipes through which tritium-tainted water might leak, for example—is similar to "inaccuracies" in the company's filings with New York State agencies.
New York has an interest in the spinoff because three of the plants that would be affected—Indian Point 2 and 3 and Fitzpatrick—are located in New York State. The spinoff plan is related to the future of Vermont Yankee because as part of the business plan involving Enexus, Entergy has applied to have Vermont Yankee's operating license, which now terminates in 2012, extended for 20 years to 2032.
Entergy plans to form Enexus by raising $3.5 billion which would then be transferred to Enexus as debt, leaving the new company with a sizeable financial burden and a financial rating below investment-grade.
Critics of the plan in both New York and Vermont fear that the new company would not have the capital to maintain the plants properly or to undertake the costly process of decommissioning them, especially since the recently discovered tritium leaks at Vermont Yankee are expected to make the decommissioning of that plant even more expensive.
The New York State Public Service Commission said the spinoff plan was unsound because of the heavy debt load Enexus would carry. The agency said it would give the proposal another look but did not say when.
On February 10, one day before New York's Public Service Commission declined to approve the formation of Enexus, the New York Attorney General's office weighed in with a letter bristling with irritation at Entergy's management of its dealings with that state. It seems that that very morning Entergy had filed an environmental assessment form that should have been filed 45 days before state agencies were called on to make decisions affecting Entergy's plants.
Reviews of such documents, Assistant Attorney General Charlie Donaldson wrote tersely, "should not be conducted under an artificially and needlessly compressed schedule imposed by Entergy."
Moreover, Donaldson wrote, the document was not truthful.
"For example," he wrote, "the Indian Point facilities release waste to the underlying soil and bedrock, waste that flows into the Hudson River, yet Entergy responded 'N.A.' in response to the question 'Has the site ever been used for the disposal of solid or hazardous waste?'& How an indebted Enexus, which according to recent news reports would also face subsurface pollution issues at its Vermont Yankee facility, will decontaminate and restore the Indian Point facilities is one of the important questions in this proceeding."
