Massachusetts nuclear plant officially shuts down

Entergy Nuclear Generation Company, which is part of Entergy Corporation, closed the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station located along the shores of Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts.

Entergy announced in October 2015 that Pilgrim was retiring because of the cost of operating the plant compared to the level of wholesale power prices in New England. The 679-megawatt (MW) facility opened in 1972 and was the 10th oldest nuclear plant in the United States. It officially closed on May 31.

Pilgrim averaged 446,000 MW hours of power generation between January 2001 and March 2019.

The Independent System Operator of the New England grid (ISO-NE) said Pilgrim’s retirement would not affect system reliability this summer. ISO-NE reports that sufficient resources of power should be available to meet peak consumer demand for electricity this summer.

The Pilgrim closure comes about five years after the shutdown of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in December 2014. Vermont Yankee, which had 612 MW of capacity, succumbed to many of the same economic pressures that affected Pilgrim. The 2,073.1 MW Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut and the 1,251.4 MW Seabrook nuclear facility in New Hampshire remain open, meeting about 26 percent of daily load in the region.

Since 2013, eight nuclear power plants have closed in the United States, including Pilgrim. Relatively low natural gas prices and decreasing costs for renewable energy have hurt some older nuclear facilities. Of the eight nuclear plants to close since 2013, all but one had just one reactor.