Pilgrim Nuclear Plant to Close in June 2019

The NRC should now order Pilgrim to shutdown!!!

What is going to happen to Fitzpatrick? 

As I've talked about, as VY was dying, the agency withdrew inspection services from Pilgrim. They worried Pilgrim was going to catch the VY disease.  Entergy didn't put in enough resources into Pilgrim, this caused the plant to wildly spin out of operational control. All  the attention to Pilgrim's operational problems forced the NRC into enforcing their weak regulations. Personally I think the nuclear industry is worried about all this attention ending in reforming the NRC. 

All bets are off if the republicans recapture the presidency. One wonders how the nuclear industry teabaggers will blame the NRC for forcing Entergy to close Pilgrim?

By the way, they can shutdown whenever they want independent to the NEISO. They will just be required to pay for replacement power.  

Pilgrim nuclear power plant to close in Plymouth 

Station first opened in 1972

By David Abel Globe Staff  October 13, 2015

The company that owns Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station said Tuesday morning that it plans to close the 43-year-old plant in Plymouth. 

The company said in a statement it will close the plant no later than June 2019. 

“The decision to close Pilgrim was incredibly difficult because of the effect on our employees and the communities in which they work and live,” Leo Denault, Entergy’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

However, Denault said, “market conditions and increased costs led us to reluctantly conclude that we had no option other than to shut down the plant.” 

Company officials plan to hold a press conference at noon Tuesday in Plymouth. 

The decision comes about a month after the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission downgraded the plant’s safety rating. Pilgrim and two reactors in Arkansas are now considered the least safe in the country. 

The repairs needed to improve Pilgrim’s safety rating would have likely cost tens of millions of dollars for Entergy Corp., a Louisiana-based energy conglomerate that has owned Pilgrim since 1999. Pilgrim was already facing rising costs, declining revenues, and an energy market increasingly inhospitable to nuclear power. 

The decision will have a significant impact on the town of Plymouth as well as the region. The plant employs about 600 people and provides the South Shore town with $10 million a year and other financial benefits. 

The closure of the plant could make it significantly harder to meet the state’s goals of cutting its carbon emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below by 2050. 

Pilgrim supplies an average of about 5 percent of the region’s energy, and the 680-megawatt plant accounts for about 84 percent of the state’s non-carbon emitting energy.
Plant officials said they will have to continue operating the plant until 2019 because of agreements they have with ISO New England, the grid that supplies energy to the region. The plant could possibly close earlier if Entergy contracts with another power plant to replace the power that would have come from Pilgrim.