Decommissioned Haddam nuclear plant Connecticut Yankee received another $126 million in a dispute with the U.S. Department of Energy over the continued storage of nuclear waste in Connecticut, the plant’s owner announced Friday.
The Yankee Companies – representing the Haddam plant along with nuclear facilities in Massachusetts and Maine – has sued the federal government three times over its failure to remove spent uranium from temporary onsite storage facilities to a permanent repository. In 1998, the Energy Department was supposed to start collecting spent uranium from nuclear reactors around the country and put that waste into a permanent repository, originally planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
That promise nor Yucca Mountain never came to fruition, and the country’s nuclear plant power owners filed separate lawsuits in 2002, 2007, and 2013 over the federal government’s continued failure to remove the waste.
From the 2002 lawsuit, Connecticut Yankee received $39.7 million in February. The $126.3 million awarded on Friday was from the 2007 lawsuit. A ruling on the 2013 lawsuit, which covers the cost of keeping the nuclear waste onsite from 2009-2012, still is pending.
Yankee’s Maine and Massachusetts sites won $109 million on Friday, on top of the $120 million from the first lawsuit.
As these nuclear reactors are owned by a mix of New England utilities, the proceeds from the lawsuit will be credited to electric ratepayers in the utilities’ service territories.
