A decommissioning crew works in the dryer separator pit filled with filtered wastewater in the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station reactor. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Parts of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station have the air of a ghost town. Since operations ceased about five years ago, many of the buildings have been torn down. Concrete circles mark the spots where water tanks once stood, and weeds push up through cracks in the asphalt. Much of the plant’s radioactive materials have been stored or removed.
But the reactor building still stands, and within it sits a problem: nearly a million gallons of radioactive wastewater.
How to get rid of the water has become a flashpoint in communities from southeastern Massachusetts to Cape Cod. Holtec Decommissioning International, the company cleaning up Pilgrim, wants to dispose of the water by cleaning it as much as possible, diluting it and discharging it in batches into Cape Cod Bay.
There are other ways Holtec could deal with the radioactive water: store it, or ship it to a waste disposal site in Texas, an endeavor the company says would cost around $20 million. But David Noyes, a compliance manager for Holtec, said discharging the water will have the least environmental impact: It will release radioactivity far below federal safety limits, and avoid truck emissions and the possibility of a road accident.
“To me, it just comes down to being the right thing to do,” he said.
A decommissioning crew works on the top floor of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station reactor where wastewater is being held in the spent fuel pool and the dryer separator pit. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Not everyone agrees. A coalition of citizens, environmental activists, business groups, fishermen and members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe oppose the plan. They say Holtec is choosing the cheapest option and ignoring concerns about safety, the environment and the local economy.
The two sides have dug in. And people in other states are watching closely. Holtec is decommissioning four nuclear power plants around the country, and wants to do more if the opportunity arises. What happens at Pilgrim could affect its other projects.
“It’s part of their business model to run roughshod over the locals,” said Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod and a member of the citizen’s advisory board overseeing the Pilgrim cleanup. He said Holtec is refusing to consider other options like shipping or storage, and stonewalling opposition “to avoid having a bunch of difficult people in Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts create a playbook that other jurisdictions can follow.”
900,000 gallons
The controversial wastewater is stored in several locations in Pilgrim’s reactor building, including two shimmering pools on the cavernous refueling floor. After Pilgrim closed in 2019, workers removed the most radioactive waste from this area — the nuclear fuel rods. They’re stored in 20-foot-tall casks made of steel and concrete on a hill near the plant. They’ll stay there indefinitely, until the U.S. government finds a final resting place for them.
But approximately 900,000 gallons of the water used to cool those fuel rods remain in the reactor building. The water is contaminated with radioactive elements, metals and PFAS, chemicals that last so long in the environment they’re often called “forever chemicals.”
Pilgrim and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health measured the radioactive contaminants in the water. According to Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, samples of one radioactive element, tritium, averaged about about a million times higher than average levels in the ocean. Another element, cesium-137, measured about 200 million times higher than existing levels in the North Atlantic.
These numbers reflect the radioactivity in untreated water. While Pilgrim was operating, workers regularly cleaned, diluted and discharged batches of this type of water into Cape Cod Bay, usually during refueling shutdowns. Radioactive waste disposal is regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which allowed Pilgrim’s operators to dump wastewater into the bay as long as the radioactivity was below federal safety limits.
The water discharge canal at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station which leads out into Cape Cod Bay. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Noyes said Holtec expected to continue this practice after Pilgrim shut down, using the same state and federal wastewater permits. He maintains the plan is safe — and legal. But he admitted that communication with the public has been fraught.
“If you walk up to somebody on the street and ask them if it’s OK for a nuclear power plant to put their radioactive waste in the ocean, most people are going to fundamentally tell you ‘no,’ ” he said.
That’s exactly what happened. Groups across the region — and across the political spectrum — joined in opposition to the plan, and protests outside Plymouth town hall have become regular occurrences. About a dozen protesters came out on a rainy night in September holding signs with slogans like, “Not One Drop!” and, “Our bay is not Pilgrim’s dump!”
One protestor, Joanne Corrigan, lives at Priscilla Beach near Pilgrim and said she’s concerned about radioactivity in the water.
“Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there,” she said. “I’m worried when my grandkids come down to visit and are on the beach, in the water, playing in the sand.”
Another protester, Peter Dalton, lives in nearby Duxbury and is on the town’s Shellfish Advisory Committee.
He said Duxbury alone has nearly 30 oyster farms, “and the impression that this can be dumped in the bay is going to put these people out of business,” he said.
Protesters outside Plymouth Town Hall. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
Many opponents agree with Dalton — that discharging the water would be bad for local businesses, fisheries and tourism, whether or not it causes ecological harm.
“Think about it this way,” said Gottlieb, if you could buy fish caught in water you knew had been irradiated, or fish caught elsewhere, “What are you going to choose?”
Holtec officials say the concern is overblown. After all, Pilgrim discharged “hundreds of millions of gallons” of radioactive wastewater during the plant’s operating years, and that didn’t hurt the shellfishing industry, said Noyes.
“I’m fairly certain that the discharge of an additional million gallons, or less than a million gallons, has no harm,” he said.
‘I consider this nuclear waste’
About 30 miles down the Cape, Buesseler, the scientist at Woods Hole, has been watching the saga unfold.
He’s an expert on radioactivity in the ocean, and said seawater already has varying levels of radioactivity from both natural and human sources. If Holtec discharges the radioactive wastewater, it should still be safe to swim in Cape Cod Bay and eat fish caught there, he said. But the long-term effects for humans and marine life are unclear.
“Every sample of seawater I get, I can measure radioactivity. So it’s not like there’s zero and we’re adding something to it,” he said. “But every additional amount can increase health risks, and we have to admit that. Over the long term, you would have to say this probably isn’t a good idea, and so let’s minimize this as much as possible.”
Since 1972, the operators of Pilgrim have monitored samples of seawater, sediment, shellfish, lobster and fish in the bay for radiation exposure, and have found no adverse effects on marine life. State Department of Public Health testing has not found concerning levels of radiation exposure in marine life, and reports radiation levels in fish and shellfish similar to background levels. A 2022 state report found no radiation levels that indicated a human health concern.
Buesseler said more thorough monitoring will be needed in the decades to come to measure potential longer-term harm to animals and the environment. He’s concerned that some elements like radioactive cobalt and cesium could accumulate on the seafloor near the outflow pipe; and strontium-90 could accumulate in the bones and shells of marine animals.
One of the entryways to a place where wastewater is stored at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Buesseler also worries that Holtec’s plan could open the door for other shuttered nuclear plants to dispose of wastewater the same way. Plus, he said, since Massachusetts residents no longer benefit from Pilgrim’s power, they shouldn’t have to put up with Pilgrim’s waste.
“I consider this nuclear waste, and we are not allowed to put nuclear waste materials directly in the ocean for dumping and disposal,” he said. “So, I think this is not a good precedent to be sending to say, ‘Let’s do this because that’s what we’ve always done.’ “
Research published in 2022 by Woods Hole oceanographer Irina Rypina predicts the plume of radiation discharged from Pilgrim would circulate through the bay and flow to the outer Cape. Rypina recently completed a more sophisticated modeling study to predict plume direction based on ocean currents, wind, weather and seasonal variability. Her findings suggest that in winter and fall, almost none of the wastewater would flow out of the bay in the month following the release.
Earlier this year, Massachusetts environmental officials denied Holtec’s request to revise the company’s wastewater discharge permit and allow it to dump the wastewater into Cape Cod Bay. The decision determined the dumping would violate the state’s Ocean Sanctuaries Act.
Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod and a member of the NDCAP, at a meeting in Plymouth Town Hall. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
Holtec is appealing the decision, a process that will likely be resolved in late 2025.
In the meantime, the company is letting the water evaporate, releasing small amounts of radioactive tritium through the air vents in the reactor building. Tritium radiation does not travel very far in the air, but it can enter the body when people eat food and drink water containing tritium, or inhale it. The NRC allows airborne releases of tritium, and Holtec’s reported releases are below the agency’s safety limits.
Holtec has evaporated hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater since the start of decommissioning at Pilgrim, and has enhanced the process in recent winters by heating the wastewater pools. Holtec said the procedure helps warm the building and keep pipes from freezing. But the practice has angered local residents and opposition groups.
The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station reactor building. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Holtec is “playing for time,” said Gottlieb. “I believe the goal [is] to drag this permit appeal out sufficiently long that they’ve had enough winters that they can evaporate all the water, and have a cost of disposal which is essentially zero.”
“They’re using — instead of the public’s water — the public’s air as a dumping ground.”
The delay in dealing with the wastewater frustrates Pine duBois, executive director of the Jones River Watershed Association and a member of the citizen’s advisory board overseeing the Pilgrim cleanup. She said it would be irresponsible to ship waste to another state, and the debate over dumping the water is a “distraction” from the real dangers — climate change, rising sea levels and the potential for a nor’easter to hit a half cleaned-up nuclear site.
“It’s going to wreck Plymouth if they don’t get that site cleaned up,” she said. “So let’s focus on what the real task is and stop wasting time.”
There is general agreement on one point: The sooner Pilgrim is cleaned up, the better.
Noyes said Holtec is on track to finish dismantling buildings and decontaminating the site in 2034; the NRC should offer its final review in 2035.