Turkey Point nuclear station was back before U.S. nuclear regulators Wednesday as Florida Power & Light battles to have operating licenses for its two 1970s-era reactors extended another 20 years.
But, in a pretrial hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper argued regulators have failed to fully consider increasingly dire impacts from climate change, including rising temperatures and sea rise projections that predict areas around the plant in southern Miami-Dade County will be frequently flooded by 2040.
“This would be the first plant of its kind to run for that long and we actually don't know how an aging plant like that will hold up, especially in the face of climate change,” said Waterkeeper attorney Cameron Bills.
READ MORE: Nuclear regulators reverse Turkey Point operating license extensions
The hearing was part of a protracted process as FPL and regulators struggle to assess how the low-lying plant on the shores of Biscayne Bay, east of Homestead, will deal with rising seas and other impacts.
Turkey Point was the first nuclear plant in the nation to seek another round of license extensions, which would prolong the reactor's lifespan to 80 years. After initially granting the extension, regulators took the rare step of reversing their decision in 2022 and resetting the expiration date to the existing termination in the early 2030s. Regulators then ordered a new environmental study after conceding they relied on outdated climate information provided by FPL.
They’re now considering that revised study. Wednesday’s hearing was a chance to hash out Waterkeeper’s renewed challenges. Waterkeeper is also arguing that the latest environmental study excludes findings that a saltwater plume spreading from cooling canals used to operate the reactors could damage drinking water supplies over time.
“This would be the first plant of its kind to run for that long and we actually don't know how an aging plant like that will hold up, especially in the face of climate change."Waterkeeper attorney Cameron Bills
In a of the nation’s nuclear fleet, the Government Accountability Office echoed the climate concerns.
It warned that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to take a harder look at how it factors risks at 54 active nuclear plants and 21 shuttered facilities across the country. All 75, the GAO said, face worsening heat and drought — two conditions that make Turkey Point particularly vulnerable since it relies on the sprawling cooling canals to keep the plant running.
During their two-year review, GAO inspectors visited Turkey Point, where National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials have warned that sea rise fueling saltwater intrusion could seep into cooling canals, potentially increasing salty water.
In response to inspectors, NRC officials said measures already in place covered climate risks. But NRC officials pointed out that no assessment had been done to "demonstrate that this is the case."
Concerns over water temperatures
Concerns about more extreme conditions have plagued the plant for more than a decade after in the canals during the summer of 2014. Brackish water in the steamy canals , fueling the underwater plume and pushing drinking water wellfields. When canal water was found , potentially fouling a national park, Miami-Dade County finally forced FPL to begin cleaning up the plume.
The clean-up itself raised new questions when the plan called for pumping millions of gallons of brackish water from the deeper Floridan aquifer to freshen the canals. To shrink the plume, FPL is extracting the salty water and flushing it underground into deep injection wells.
While monitoring of salty water shows the plume shrinking, Waterkeeper argues the detection of tritium, a tracer element found in water connected to nuclear reactors, shows canal water continues to spread westward.
“This is the wrong forum to challenge those prior actions of state and local regulators."FPL attorney Ryan Lighty
“It's getting pushed westward and our key evidence for that is tritium data that we received from the county on April 29 of this year,” Bills told licensing board judges.
But FPL attorney Ryan Lighty argued the tritium data is inconclusive.
“There's no discussion at all about when that tritium or where that tritium may have originated,” he said.
Both Lighty and NRC attorney Jeremy Wachutka also argued that neither challenges about the plume or climate change contain enough new information to justify another round of hearings with nuclear regulators. Lighty said many of Waterkeeper’s should be taken up with state authorities.
“This is the wrong forum to challenge those prior actions of state and local regulators. But in its reply, Waterkeeper offers a somewhat passive aggressive suggestion that those regulators have failed to fulfill their obligations to protect the health and safety of the public, and therefore the NRC should step in,” Lighty said. “But that's not the NRC’s role.”
The three-judge Atomic Safety panel has 45 days to decide whether to let Waterkeeper’s challenges continue. If they reject them, Bills said Waterkeeper plans to appeal to the full commission.
“The public has a right to understand before this renewal goes through relicensing for another 20 years, from the 2030s and to the 2050s, what the full extent of impacts on groundwater will be, and on climate change and on all these environmental issues,” she said. “And right now we actually just don't know.”
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