Holtec Investigating Contaminated Soil at Indian Point

‘Essentially zero risk to workers,’ says company

Holtec is still trying to determine how soil at the Indian Point nuclear power plant near Philipstown became contaminated with radioactive material.

The radiation levels are not considered dangerous. A Holtec official said at a May 1 meeting of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board that a person would have to “ingest many pounds” of the dirt to reach even one-tenth of the allowable federal limits. But the contamination is a concern because it was discovered far from where any of the three reactors were located or where nuclear waste is stored.

Holtec, which began decommissioning the closed plant in 2021, reported the contamination at the December meeting of the oversight board. It was detected when Holtec was investigating building a data center and conducted surface soil sampling around a training center on the southern end of the site. The tests detected elevated levels of cesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission.

“The levels are low, but it still needs to be remediated,” said Frank Spagnuolo of Holtec. Don Mayer, who worked at Indian Point for more than 30 years, beginning in 1981, and now is part of the decommissioning team, said the radiation is low enough to be “essentially zero risk to workers.”

Nevertheless, the contamination is being treated as radioactive waste and is being excavated and shipped via rail to nuclear storage facilities out of state. Holtec has said it has purchased equipment to conduct more extensive surveys to search for similar contamination elsewhere. “We don’t want to be surprised anymore,” said Spagnuolo.

It’s not clear how cesium-137 ended up so far from the reactors and fuel storage. Holtec also tested the area for other common byproducts of fission, such as strontium-90 and nickel-63, but found nothing.

Mayer said he doesn’t think the contamination happened during the three decades he worked at the plant. He suggested it may have occurred in the 1970s, during construction of two of Indian Point’s three reactors. The first reactor, which went offline in 1974 because it lacked an emergency cooling system, had a leak at some point that contaminated the soil. Mayer said that some of that soil may have been excavated to where the training center was later built to make room for the second and third reactors and the plant’s monitoring equipment at the time wasn’t advanced enough to detect it.

Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years; if the contamination did occur in the 1970s, the material would be less than half as potent, which may explain the low level of radiation. “By the next meeting we’ll have some good information,” said Spagnuolo.

Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit filed by Holtec against New York State over a 2023 law that prohibits the company from discharging radioactive wastewater into the Hudson River continues. The state Department of Environmental Conservation said at the May 1 meeting that it is pausing the renewal of Holtec’s “pollutant discharge elimination system” permit in the meantime.

Last year, the state attorney general accused Holtec of discharging radioactive water into the Hudson despite the law. Holtec countered that the discharges weren’t waste from the spent fuel pools but groundwater and stormwater, a process that has been going on for 15 years.

When asked at the meeting about the discharges, Spagnuolo said he could not respond because of the ongoing litigation. He referred board members to the 2024 Annual Radioactive Effluent Release Report, released April 30. It notes that the discharges are happening but that the “offsite dose associated with the groundwater pathway remains extremely small,” contributing less than 1 percent of the annual limit.