Documents filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in advance of Tuesday’s $5 billion merger between Northeast Utilities of Hartford, Conn., and the Boston-based NStar reveal a hefty liability comes with the deal — namely, a 24 percent share of the $94.9 million Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co. expects to pay in spent-nuclear-fuel-management costs through 2023.
That estimate is provided by Maine Yankee spokesman Eric Howes and updates figures cited within an attachment accompanying a Dec. 6, 2010 letter from Wayne A. Norton, chief nuclear officer of Maine Yankee and CEO and president of Yankee Atomic and Connecticut Yankee, to the NRC, which licenses the facility storing Maine Yankee’s spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste in 64 dry-cask storage containers on a 12-acre site in Wiscasset.
“No changes in the licensed activities or management of any of the Yankee Companies’ facilities will result from the proposed merger,” Norton wrote in his letter. “The shareholders of each Yankee Company are obligated to pay facility operating expenses in direct proportion to their ownership interests in accordance with rate schedules on file with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.”
Howes said as of Dec. 31, 2011, the cost of managing the high-level radioactive spent fuel stored at the Maine Yankee site has been pegged at $94.9 million through 2023, with an additional $10.8 million budgeted for the eventual dismantlement and decommissioning of the Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation once a permanent home is found for the radioactive waste. At present, there is no agreed-upon permanent site for storing Maine Yankee’s spent nuclear fuel, which contains isotopes the NRC says “can take hundreds of thousands of years” to “become harmless” through decay.
In January, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future released its final report, which recommends creating one or more consolidated storage facilities as an interim step toward a permanent disposal facility. Top priority, if the commission’s recommendation is followed, would be given to transferring spent fuel being stored at Maine Yankee and other nuclear power plants that already are decommissioned.
Under the $5 billion merger between Northeast Utilities of Hartford, Conn., and the Boston-based NStar, Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co. will come under indirect minority ownership of Northeast Utilities.
Before the merger, Northeast Utilities had a 20 percent share of Maine Yankee through its subsidiaries, The Connecticut Light and Power Co., Public Service Company of New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts Electric Company. NStar owned 4 percent of Maine Yankee through its subsidiary, NStar Electric Company.
Northeast Utilities, which assumes 24 percent ownership of Maine Yankee under its merger with NStar, will be the name of the new company. NStar will be a Northeast Utilities subsidiary.
The other major shareholders of Maine Yankee not affiliated with Northeast Utilities, as identified by Norton in a March 16, 2011, letter to the NRC are: Central Maine Power Co., 38 percent; New England Power Co., 24 percent; Bangor Hydro-Electric, 7 percent; Central Vermont Public Service Corp., 2 percent; Maine Public Service Co., 5 percent.
The newly combined company operates six electric and natural gas utilities serving 3.5 million customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. It will operate out of dual headquarters in Hartford and Boston and, with 9,000 workers, becomes the largest utility in New England.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ahhh….. the good old days. Anyone else remember when CMP was telling everyone how nuclear power would be so cheap that it would in effect be too cheap to meter.
Yup. and no one ever built a house without a meter, and no meter was ever removed from a CMP powered home.
I remember the good ‘ol days before deregulation when bills were $30.00 a month, not the $130.0o they are now. 51% of my bill is delivery charges. Great deal we got.
When your electric bill was only $30 how many cents did a gallon of gas cost ?
Good point. Out of memory, I still believe it was a high-at-the-time $2.65. I may be off, but i’ll bet it is only a matter of .10 or.20 cents. But, Hydro has never come to my house with a 5 gallon pail of electricity. They don’t even have to drive around and check meters, anymore. Ohh, they’re pocketing some coin, even at at todays fuel prices.
“…those Pesky Fuel Rods again. They’ll be saying the same thing 2,500,000 years from now and cursing at this particular geologic epoch which will become known as the Idiots-cene.
Nukes are not green and are about the dirtiest on the planet. I’ll take Global Climate Change, Coal, Fracking, Oil, and killing Golden Eagles with Wind Turbines any day over these Nukes. There are alternatives, just ones that don’t work so well for the short sighted thinking of Corporate Wall Street hedge fund investors and ponzi schemers who have nuked away our future with their radioactive poisons.
If we had looked at alternative energy and conservation the same way we approached going to the moon, we’d boost the economy and maybe develop a true green energy economy. But this would go against the grain at Westinghouse, Wall Street and BP etc. So it won’t happen. We existed for millennia before this crap, and can afterwards though the transitions will be messy and likely Malthusian in scope. But its inevitable.
Nuke Plants are part of a failed 1960s vintage business model. Time to retire and dismantle all of them and solve the issue of waste disposal, which will end up being the major downside of the energy efficiency equation. Disposing of this waste or rendering it inert will take tremendous amounts of energy. If it is even possible. We are no closer now to this than 40 years ago….”
Blimey. The Clamshell Alliance lives.
It is growing in Japan.
Connect the dots.
There was no reason to close down Maine Yankee. What a travesty. From what I understand from McCarthy’s article, the spent fuel rods currently stored at the MY site will eventually be moved “somewhere” – outside the state? The newly-formed consortium of utility companies assumes the cost and liability for storage and eventual removal. Great. And now we are trucking in thousands of tons of toxic – yes, toxic – waste from outside the state to be “processed” and dumped at Juniper Ridge and most likely Dolby and other sites. We have simpy traded one evil for another. Which one is worse?
No,,,,,,, Maine Yankee needed to go offline, it leaked like a sieve…!
When they carted off the broken-up dome, at first the fools didnt cover up the train loads of contaminated material, and yes it was hot.
Regretfully, your right about the toxic dump that Maine has become.
That’s not true. I was an operator at the plant at the time of closing. The plant, overall, was in great shape. Just two years before closing, we received Power magazine’s award as the most efficient power plant in the US. Our steam generators wwere in need of replacement, which at the time was a costly and timely undertaking. But we were generating electricity at around 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Compare that to the price you pay today.
There are a lot of reasons why the plant was closed; it was something of a perfect storm of events. If the plant had gone up for sale a year later, it would probably still be operating. No one had ever sold a nuclear power plant before, and no one had ever purchased a used plant. Since then, many have sold for big bucks. They are considered safe, reliable and inexpensive sources of electrcity in the utility industry.
If you say so, but the fact is that it did leak, and during the dismantling phase there was spikes of radiation from the dust.
Could it have been fixed, I think so, but maybe you might share some of your insight of why they didnt…?
When you say, “leak”, I would surmise that the vast majority of readers contemplate a situation where the health and safety of the public (and plant employees) is endangered and reactor integrity is compromised. That was never the case.
Without being too technical, I will say that in the earlier part of Maine Yankee’s life, plant operators followed a type of “non-volatile” water chemistry that ultimately contributed to the weakening of the steam generators and lead to the formation of pockets of contamination, or radioactive “hotspots”. But even then, we had changed that chemistry practice and were actively engaged in removing (decontaminating) the hot spots. Overall, the plant was in great shape at the time of it’s closing.
The nuclear power plants that operate in the US today are comprised largely of 1950’s technology. I’ll be the first to admit that they are far from perfect and that they exhibit significant shortcomings. But I still believe that they are far better than the alternatives, which include sending our men and women to fight wars in distant lands, all to keep oil flowing.
It might surprise you to know that I am very much pro nuclear power, but Maine Yankee had its problems. I would like to see another power source for Wiscasset, even a nuke, but sadly its the NIMBY’s that are killing our state.
Thanks for your response. As I wrote earlier, nuclear power does have significant shortcomings. I truly believe that many of these shortcomings are addressed through the design of the next generation of reactors. As we develop and advance, I believe that more practical solutions to the shortcomings, including high-level waste, will emerge.
Agreed
Your opening statement needs to be corrected, “There was no reason to close down Maine Yankee.”
The utility selected closing Maine Yankee due mostly to the costs it would have had to incurred to make the facility safe to operate. Least anyone for get there was leakage, cracked pipes, contamination of soil and water. The cost estimates were significant enough the utility decided it was cheaper to close the plant, to dismantle it, remove the contaminated soil, shipped hundreds of train cars to Utah, clean up and restore the site to meet industry standards then to basically “rebuild” the whole plant with a billion or two dollars.
Also, while Wayne A. Norton, chief nuclear officer of Maine Yankee and CEO and president of Yankee Atomic and Connecticut Yankee, stated “The shareholders of each Yankee Company are obligated to pay facility operating expenses in direct proportion to their ownership interests in accordance with rate schedules on file with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.” These costs are recaptured in utility rates. Maine Yankee ratepayers (we the consumers of electricity) have already contributed to a fund that the utility is stewarding, now in excess of $100,000,000 for the disposal of the nuclear waste generated before it shut down. The day to day storage at the old Maine Yankee site is costing ratepayers, not stockholders.
I’m sorry to have an assumption here, but if it is correct, you have my respect, as well as my late grandfathers. And if my assumption is correct, you would have deep knowledge of this subject. I have one question. Why is this passed on to the rate payer, as opposed to the owners? I work in carpentry, and while we charge an amount for clean up, above and beyond is our proffit loss. Why is this huge dollar industry able to charge the consumer for short commings? Law Enforcement has a 30% conviction rate, and billion dollar shareholders charge us for clean-up. Neither seems acceptable to this simple farmer.
Utilities were granted the ability to utilize nuclear energy under the Atomic Energy Act in the 1950’s which created the AEC, Atomic Energy Commission. Before that anything dealing with the splitting of atoms could only be done under the government (federal). The AEC was changed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to over see the Nuclear industry due in part to the potential dangers and utilization of nuclear energy by-products (radioactive materials) into nuclear weapons grade material or a lesser threat of materials for the making of “dirty-bombs.” Because the waste remains radioactive for close to a couple of hundred thousands years, 178,000 if I remember right.
Utilities are allowed to recapture costs as they do in construction and operations. For radioactive waste long term storage a 1/10 of a cent is charges on all electricity produced and consumed from nuclear power. Technically it sits in the Nuclear Waste fund. Utilities are allowed under federal law to charge for that, those that receive the benefit from the power pays instead of charging future consumers for when the waste is disposed of. Federal law currently states the Federal Government will take the waste to a national repository beginning in January 1, 1998. Oops, they don’t have a site yet…., but they have collected, with interest well over $30,000,000,000 for the disposal. It sits in the Nuclear Waste Fund…., well the IOU’s do. Congress, Republican and Democratic, administrations of both parties have borrowed the funds over the years. But, don’t worry… Congress has to pay interest on what they’ve borrowed and the fund which collects about an additional $750,000,000 per year is also collecting $1,000,000,000 (that’s a billion) in interest. Right now the Fund is over $30,000,000,000 and growing. And, someday they will decide if they will meet the January 1, 1998 deadline. Hey, its only a federal law that every administration has chosen to ignore. But, don’t you try to not go by the federal statutes (double negative to stress the point).
The whole thing is more complexed that the outline above, but for a shorten version factual.
Juniper Ridge is a radioactive waste dump ?
I couldn’t agree more. And while we’re at it, let’s expose the truth about these so-called advancements like automobiles, airplanes and penicillin. A lot of people will be hurt by these things, mind you. Let’s stop them now, while we still can!
I wonder how long all the windmills will take to decay? ;-) You know, the windmills that still don’t equal what MY generated, the windmills that require a dino power plant to be continuously running for those days the wind doesn’t blow? You want to talk about failed plans.
Isn’t it funny what the “Wind Experts” chose not to tell us about all those hidden costs.
Did you know that the fossil powered plants have to run and still be on standby even when the wind does blow? Oh, that’s right, the “Wind Experts” completely “forgot” to mention that.
Amen to that
May as well fire this thing up again. The storage problem isn’t going away.
I dont see how thats possible, considering most in the picture you above is now gone…
Yes, I think it’s been mostly dismantled. Maine Yankee still exists as an entity in order to maintain the spent fuel rods storage facility still on-site.
AKA: Maine taxpayer?
If history is a guide, any time the nuclear industry give you a cost estimate, you can safely double it to get a little closer to actual costs, which somehow always get dumped on tax payers and customers and not investors.
Of course there haven’t been any real Wall Street investors in nuclear since the 1970s — not without massive taxpayer subsidies and loan guarantees.
I can see why our “socialist” president continues to support nuclear, but I can’t figure out why Republicans are its strongest backers.
There have been plenty of offers of alternative power projects that would have offset the storage costs of the spend fuel, brought many well paying jobs to the area, and benefitted the Wiscasset tax base, but the NIMBY’s pooh-poohed everything.
Thats a lot of tax relief for area residents to have to pass-up
If it has kept operating how much waste would there now be in The Wiscasset Radioactivity Park ?
Your right, “Old Leaky Britches” was a radioactive nightmare. There were a few alternative proposals that would have offset the stewardship costs of the spent waste barrels on the sight, but the anti-anything group (not necessarily the residents) make any alternative form of energy a legal minefield.
Its over with, no one is interested in developing the greenie’s briar patch, so the residents are left picking up the tab.
With all the transmission lines in place, why couldn’t another nuclear, propane, coal, wood or other fuel be brought in and use as much of the steam generating equipment as possible?