Page 336 - Beyond Decommissioning

312 Beyond Decommissioning

7.4 Heritage Minerals Site, Manchester, NJ (Asbury Park
Press, 2015)

The operations at the mining quarry, situated between routes 37 and 70 south of
Lakehurst, New Jersey, were carried out many years under the NRC license. Sand con-
taining monazite—which contains minor fractions of thorium and uranium—was
mined on the site. When mining operations were discontinued, an area of some
2
180,000m remained radiologically contaminated, where mine tailings were
concentrated.
In 2005, the NRC terminated its supervision of Heritage Minerals, after the quarry
was decommissioned and decontaminated to the NRC release criteria. But in 2006,
New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection required a deeper cleanup
because the NJ department used release criteria stricter than the NRCs.
A builder, Hovsons Inc. of Neptune proposed to build Manchester’s newest com-
munity on the old quarry—as many as 2450 new homes. However, the contaminated
area was a problem. Eventually, a solution emerged and the plan was approved by the
Manchester’s Planning Board. Under the plan, the contaminated area would be capped
and restricted to green space or recreational purposes.

7.5 Yankee Rowe NPP, MA (Hamilton et al., 2005)

The experience at the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station (YNPS), MA, United
States highlights a process whereby stakeholder interests and owner’s business objec-
tives were openly put on the table, assessed, and ultimately converged. The YNPS
experience shows that the alignment of potentially conflicting interests facilitates
property transfer solutions that are palatable to both owners and stakeholders.
The YNPS decommissioning and site release activities were coordinated through a
Site Closure Project Plan (SCPP), which served as the main tool for interacting with
stakeholders. One of SCCP’s earliest and most important findings was the need to take
a proactive approach to property disposition alternatives. As a matter of fact, while
reviewing the regulatory requirements and stakeholder concerns that were likely to
apply to the decommissioning and site release, SCPP realized that the constraints
likely to be posed by potential recipients of the property were the strictest and most
extensive comprehensive among the multitude of other requirements.
SCPP found that the property disposition component introduced a paradigm shift to
the site decommissioning and release including a distinct set of deadlines, regulatory
programs, financial aspects, and stakeholder concerns other than those needed to com-
plete decommissioning and release the site. In other words, preparing disposition of
the property under alternative scenarios had heavy impacts on the sequencing of oper-
ations and the timing of compliance with set objectives.
The planning for property disposition began with the agreed-on assumption that
the organization owning the YNPS would have dissolved on completion of
decommissioning, which made it desirable to dispose of the property during the
organization’s dissolution process. Besides, being most of the facility property