Camps agree on Yankee termination plan

WISCASSET – Former foes came together Monday to announce an agreement aimed at resolving the remaining stumbling blocks to the decommissioning of the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant.

An anti-nuclear activist and Maine Yankee executives, along with state officials, announced that they signed an agreement on a license termination plan, the document that guides the decommissioning.

The document complies with the state’s radiation standards, which are stricter than the federal government’s.

The Maine standards were set last year by the Legislature, which required a residual dose of 10 millirem with no more than 4 millirem from groundwater per year when the decommissioning is complete. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires Maine Yankee to meet a residual radiological dose of 25 millirem.

“When we’re finished here, I think we can confidently say we’ll beat that handily,” said Michael Meisner, Maine Yankee’s chief nuclear officer.

Terms of the agreement also call for enhancements of Maine Yankee’s program for sampling and analysis of groundwater, vegetation, soil and the intertidal zone for traces of radiation, Meisner said.

In addition, it provides a framework for resolving a number of the technical issues relating to sampling data, instrument calibration, field measurement and radiological dose modeling.

The decommissioning of Maine Yankee, which was permanently closed in 1997, is intended to make the 800-acre property suitable for other uses, including recreational and business development.

The agreement calls for tests outside the licensed area in the bottom of the Sheepscot River and in the intertidal zone, as well as tests of fish, said Ray Shadis of Friend of the Coast Opposing Nuclear Pollution.

Shadis, who was a critic of the nuclear plant when it was in operation, praised Maine Yankee for going out of its way to make sure neighbors are comfortable with the cleanup.

But he said there are still disagreements and issues to be resolved, including the storage of spent fuel.

“Sometimes things do become confrontational and I fully expect that will happen in the future, perhaps the near future, because there are issues we see differently,” he said.

For now, the decommissioning is 55 percent complete, and the pace will pick up once workers begin removing the spent fuel three months from now. The decommissioning is expected to be completed in 2004.

There are 1,434 nuclear fuel rods that must be removed from a pool in the reactor’s containment building.

The spent fuel will be stored in dry casks on the property. The concrete casks are expected to be moved from Wiscasset after the opening of a federal high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.