The Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant shut down on December 29, 2014. The plant and surrounding grounds must now be decommissioned. NorthStar is a company that specializes in decommissioning and has pending applications before the Vermont Public Utility Commission to purchase the plant from Entergy Nuclear. NorthStar CEO Scott State says his company can decommission, clean up and complete site restoration of the plant decades sooner than Entergy had planned.
"The original planning for this project involved a process called SAFSTOR. And under that process the actual decommissioning would have been deferred effectively for about 60 years. The process that we’re proposing is one called Prompt Decom and under that process we’re committing to do the decommissioning immediately. So the actual time that it takes us to do the decommissioning work is not substantially less than it would have been under the prior approach but it’s being done immediately as opposed to deferred. We’re just starting much sooner than the proposed process would have started. And you know with that there aren’t any differences in the approach to working on the project or safety or any of those factors. We just simply determined that the project could be done now and it would not have to be deferred."
NorthStar CEO Scott State anticipates that by the latter half of 2018, all conditions for closing will be met and decommissioning will begin.